


Dreams Deferred

by kerlin



Category: Farscape
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-09-03
Updated: 2010-09-03
Packaged: 2017-10-11 10:36:58
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 37,752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/111506
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kerlin/pseuds/kerlin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You can only delay the inevitable for so long; sometime between the command carrier and the Leviathan graveyard, Moya's crew make their choices.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dreams Deferred

**Author's Note:**

> Through the many, many months it took to write and edit this fic, there were several people whose help was invaluable: ScaperRed, who was there since the bitter beginning of the "hey, so what if I..." emails and who never gave up on this even when I almost did; KernilCrash, whose reassurances and advice and beta services were incredible; scrubschick, whose thoughts and beta grounded me when I needed it; and CretKid, for all the late-night idea bouncing sessions that helped focus parts that may have otherwise remained hopelessly fuzzed.

“We go in, we get what we need, we leave.”

The transport pod traced a slow descent through the atmosphere of the planet as D’Argo tried to keep the group on focus. The datachip with Macton Tal’s location weighed heavy against his chest, where he kept it tucked away in an inside pocket.

Behind his back, Chiana made a disappointed face and rolled her eyes. The atmosphere on Moya had been growing more and more stuffy and oppressive since their flight from the Command Carrier, and while the young Nebari had matured over the cycles, there was only so much doom and gloom she could take. Sometimes a girl just had to look at something besides the same gold-brown walls day in and day out.

Her gaze flicked over across the transport pod to its pilot, and she suppressed a shiver. No small part of her temporary need for more space was the people she had been sharing it with recently.

Aeryn Sun’s hands were calm and calculating on the pod controls, but something about her every movement bespoke a grief buried too deeply to express. She’d suffered a double loss in the past monen, first of her lover and then of the living ship who had been like a child to her, and in typical Peacekeeper fashion had responded by locking away Aeryn and leaving only Officer Sun visible to the world.

In the other pilot’s chair, John Crichton sat, letting the former Peacekeeper guide the pod to the landing site. He slumped back in the chair in a way that was at once an almost sulky denial of his presence on this particular trip, and at the same time an almost palpable yearning to be somewhere else, anywhere else. There were black smudges on his hands that earlier that morning had been mathematical figures, before Chiana had grasped his hands to tug him up from his contorted napping.

He hardly slept anymore, her surrogate brother, only napped long enough to replenish a small part of the burning energy that coursed through him. And then he was up again, inky pen in hands, scribbling on any surface that was handy. He worked silently, and that bothered Chiana more than anything else, that the once garrulous human now carried on his most important work without a word. Sometimes Aeryn sat with him while he scrawled; Chiana wasn’t sure why, but she knew that the tension in John Crichton reapportioned itself, rising and falling at the same time, and subtlely oriented itself in Aeryn’s direction. His movements lost some of their manic edge and became more deliberate, but at the same time he retreated further into himself. When Chiana visited John after Aeryn had been sitting with him, he looked right through her with eyes the same color blue as the wormholes that would someday be formed by the symbols on his skin.

It had been Jool that had alerted them to the food shortage. D’Argo had blustered, not one to be caught up in the logistics of their situations, and Jool had pointed out that they had no idea how far away the Leviathan burial grounds might be. There was an inhabited planet not too far from their present course. They needn’t delay long. Chiana had wavered along the edges of the discussion, something tickling in the back of her mind – not a feeling, not an instinct, not even vaguely formed into good or bad. Just there. And that made her uneasy.

In the end it had been Aeryn’s crisp nod that had decided them all on the brief tangent, more so than Jool’s frustrating logic or Rygel’s predictions of starvation. Aeryn had nodded, yes, they should get more food, and something had awoken in John, who had up to that point been staring moodily out of the window of command as if to see a wormhole that wasn’t there. John had spoken long enough to lend his weight to the stop, and that had given D’Argo the course of action that he needed.

And so here they were, all crowded into a transport pod and arrowing down through a canopy so thick that they’d had to wait for the local transit authorities to send them a specific course trajectory.

Druinos, it seemed, was a planet whose inhabitable areas were entirely covered in thickly grown forests. A brief travel guide had come uploaded with the course trajectory, and had stated that the average size of one of the kavench trees was forty five metras in radius. Jool had snorted somewhat impolitely at that figure until they had grown close enough to see the living ceiling of the world firsthand, and then she had grown quiet in awe.

They crossed the canopy line, sliding through a hole that they never could have seen on their own, Aeryn’s hands sure and steady on the controls.

The first sight of Anlach City elicited an involuntary gasp from Chiana, and her eyes widened at the sight.

The Druinosi lived among the trees that covered their planet, their thoroughfares and homes and businesses carved into the trunks of the greatest of the kavench trees. The planet was incredibly metal-poor and because of this somewhat “backwards” on the technological scale, though they welcomed space travelers and provided docking arrangements for them.

The transport pod was directed via a series of flashing, colored lights, to enter into the maw of one of the great trees, a docking bay that while tiny when compared to Moya’s, became a work of wonder when one realized that it was entirely self-contained inside a kavench tree.

Inside the docking bay there was a Druinosi to guide them into a tightly wedged space along the wall, and then to meet them with the local equivalent of the clipboard when they exited the transport pod.

The Druinosi were an avian species, their bodies covered in feathers of varying colors. Heavy, powerful wings arched along their backs, and their legs were double-jointed and thickly muscled to take up the strain of landing. Their arms were, by contrast, spindly and almost vestigal, ending in pincers of three digits tipped with carefully trimmed claws. The feathers swept back from their faces to crest upward in the back, bright black eyes set above a narrow opening that was at once a mouth and nasal cavity, and had obviously evolved from a beak, though more delicately delineated.

The particular functionary who met them at the foot of the steps was patterned in blue and gold, and stood ramrod straight, his clipboard tucked under one arm.

“Please state your business on the planet Druinos,” he intoned carefully, sliding the clipboard out from under his arm and poising to fill in a blank space on a form, writing utensil carefully balanced in one taloned hand.

“We’re just looking to buy some food,” D’Argo said placatingly, plainly looking uncomfortable in this bureaucratic dance.

“I see. Business, then.” A scratch as the functionary wrote on the form. “And how long do you intend to stay?”

D’Argo glanced at the group, from cold Aeryn to distracted John to eager Chiana and curious Jool. Rygel moved his throne sled forward next to D’Argo.

“A few arns, no more,” the Hynerian said. “Long enough to procure adequate foodstuffs. We have no especial interest in your primitive planet.”

Perhaps the word primitive sparked something in Crichton, because the human stepped forward and grabbed Rygel by the shoulder, sending him gliding back a short distance.

“Don’t pay any attention to Sparky, he just likes to shoot his mouth off.” For a moment the old John Crichton was standing there, a quirk of a smile on his lips and an obscure idiom in his phrasing.

The Druinosi jutted his lower jaw out in a gesture that they all hoped was a smile. “No offense taken, sir. You must purchase docking bay time in six-arn increments; how long do you wish to pay for at this moment?”

“Two units, please,” Chiana spoke up, eagerness in her voice. She was fascinated by this planet, with its wide, open spaces, exotic natives, and had an itch to go exploring.

“Chiana – “ D’Argo again, being protective. She whirled on him.

“Aw, c’mon, D’Argo, it doesn’t hurt to plan ahead, right? Just in case?” Teach him to be protective. She could look out for herself quite nicely, thank you very much.

“Two units it is,” the Druinosi replied, signing the bottom of the form and feeding it into an electronic device. There was a whirring, a stamp, and he handed them a metal tag. “This tag is keyed to your ship; you will not be able to access your ship without it. Please do not lose it.”

Aeryn shifted uncomfortably, eyeing the small metal chip. So easy to lose, so easy for the docking authorities to scam them. She fingered the butt of her pulse pistol and remembered another small metal chip, and the noise it made as another John Crichton threw it across the floor of a now-dead Leviathan. _ “I’m not your anything.”  
_  
“I’ll take that,” she said suddenly, and nipped the metal out of the Druinosi’s talons. Better her with the responsibility than one of the others.

“Stay in touch by comms. We leave in eight arns at the absolute latest, but remember we’re only here for food.” D’Argo kept his hands still at his side to keep from fingering the chip where it rested against him. Every microt wasted here was a microt more that Macton Tal breathed, and that was unacceptable.

Various murmurs of assent swept through the group, and they all left to go their separate ways.

~*~

  
_ It must be the change of surroundings,_ Aeryn thought as she watched Crichton examine the support system on one of the larger “streets” of Anlach City. The human knelt down at the joining of the street to the kavench tree, his eyes taking in every detail of the intricate woodwork.

Whatever the reason was for Crichton’s distraction from the wormholes, she was glad of it. She remembered all too well the last time the wormholes had been unlocked in John Crichton’s mind. Frell, she hated the things.

He didn’t know she was watching him, and that fact alone eased her mind somewhat. Watching him already stirred up so many turbulent emotions; she didn’t feel up to handling an interaction with him at the moment. At least on Moya he’d been so immersed in the wormholes that he’d barely noticed her. She had slipped in and out of his space, fulfilling her only partially acknowledged need to be near him without constantly inflicting herself with the grief that came from tracking the smooth skin over his left eyebrow and looking for a scar.

As soon as Talyn was laid to rest, she would leave. There were so many jagged edges inside of her, pieces of what had once been Aeryn Sun, and she had no idea how they all fit together. She only knew that the longer she spent in John Crichton’s company the sharper they got. She needed space, and time, to reconcile everything. She needed, desperately, to be alone and unknown.

And then there was the phrase that kept ringing through her head like an alarm klaxon, over and over it replayed in the back of her mind.

_ Officer Sun, did you know you are with child?_

She trembled at the memory, remembering the blank shock and the stammered reply to the med tech. She remembered pieces of the walk back to her temporary quarters, where she’d palmed the door closed and sat down slowly and deliberately on her bed, one hand pressed to her stomach in utter disbelief.

Several days later and Aeryn still wasn’t sure how to take the news. For that matter, she had no idea who the father was. It could be Velorek’s just as easily as it could be Crichton’s. Either Crichton – both Crichtons. And Velorek – now wasn’t that a lovely twist of pain and grief. Add it to the list, a brick more in the weight of loss that batted around her senses and screamed at her to seek the emptiness of space in her Prowler.

“Madame?” The shopkeeper asked, rattling his wares slightly to attract her attention. Frell, she had no idea what he was even selling.

Ah yes, bits of colored glass twisted up in metal. Sun-catchers and baubles like that. The shopkeeper held one up by a string, twisting it in midair with a flick of his wrist and sending multicolored light patterning across her face. The sun-catcher was streaked through with blue and violet, edged in silver, very similar in coloring to the Druinosi behind the long counter.

It was lovely, she had to admit that, and was charmed in spite of herself. Her fingers reached out to try to touch the spots of violet light before she could stop herself, and then she fisted her hand firmly. She didn’t have time for this, the others were counting on her to find fresh fruit. She turned around one heel –

\- straight into Crichton, who had snuck up behind her while she’d been watching the sun-catcher. Frell him anyway, the drannit.

_ Ah, no, not a drannit, don’t remember that day, you’ll only hurt the more for it…_

~*~

  
John leaned over the edge of the walkway and ran his hand along one of the more complicated joints, trying to imprint the knowledge of it into his fingers. He’d done his turn in shop in high school, and had even made a pretty good rocking chair for his mom one Christmas, but this surpassed anything Mr. Derville had ever tried to impart to him.

It felt good to wrap his mind around something concrete and immediate. He’d always reveled in the unexplainable before, had relished the thought of attacking a problem no one could see a solution to and coming up with the answers. But he’d lived with an unanswerable question for more than two years now, and even though the answers were slowly and grudgingly coming now, he felt no joy in the discovery.

But this – this was something that was real to the touch, something he could run his fingers along and feel the grain in the wood, look at with his eyes and follow what the crafter had done here, and then there, to make it all fit together and work perfectly.

John felt the familiar prickling on the back of his neck that meant Aeryn was watching him and he rose slowly. By the time he turned to look in her direction she had turned back to the stall, and the shopkeeper held up a bit of stained glass for her to look at.

To his surprise, she actually looked somewhat interested. Her fingers reached out to touch the flecks of light that played across the cloth walls of the stall, and his heart rose as he strode down the walkway toward her.

But almost as soon as he reached her something in her posture stiffened and she whipped away from the stall, slamming straight into him and knocking herself off balance.

“Aeryn,” he said, catching her wrists to prevent her from falling. Contact arced between them, and he could feel every bit of skin on his hands where it touched her wrists. Grimly, he suppressed it. This wasn’t what she needed right now; she was still grieving for his twin and for Talyn and Crais.

Carefully, he released her. “What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I have to go find fresh fruit.” Her voice was clipped and, for some reason, angry. She looked up into his eyes briefly. During the chaos that had surrounded the command carrier plan, they had been able to subsume all the complications in their relationship, but since Moya had starburst away from the dying carrier, the tension between them had grown and grown.

Not that John had paid much attention to it. Since the first twinklings of understanding had begun to emerge, the wormhole knowledge had consumed him. He could still feel the outlines of the symbols he’d sketched onto his arms that morning, before they had decided to come down. Moya was a large vessel, but still he and Aeryn had seemed unable to avoid each other. He’d retreated into the equations, assuming a trance-like state that had worried the others. But he’d still known when Aeryn was in the room.

But now, away from that closed-in atmosphere, the symbols that kept up a constant march through his brain seemed to be held at bay for the moment. They were still there, whispering at the edge of his subconscious, but they weren’t consuming him. Not yet, anyway.

“Mind if I tag along?” He wasn’t sure what suicidal impulse drove him to say that, but he was glad it was said. Because he _did_ want to tag along; he wanted to be near her, and he wanted to help her past the grief that had torn away the Aeryn he’d known and replaced her with this cold soldier. Because, God help him, he was still in love with her even when the very sight of him hurt her.

She looked at him, startled, and rolled her shoulder in a gesture he was pretty sure was a shrug. He decided that was a positive response, and followed her when she set off toward the fruit stalls with a decisive stride.

~*~

  
“So what do you do for fun around here?” Chiana twirled the chair around to sit in it backwards, like Crichton used to do before he got tired of even that small display of insouciance. She rested her chin on the back of the chair and smiled engagingly at the young Druinosi who sat across the table from her.

He smiled shyly, and the feathers in his crest ruffled slightly in embarrassment. “I – ah – I’m not sure what you mean?”

“Fun, you know. Dancing. Drinking. Partying. Any good parties?” Chiana cocked her head to the side and decided that her new friend was absolutely adorable. “My name’s Chiana.”

“I’m Varlin,” the Druinosi replied, tightening his hand around his drink. “Uhm – I’m not sure what to tell you. That’s not really my thing, you know?”

“Aw, c’mon. I bet underneath you’re a real party animal.” Another of Crichton’s Earthisms. They came in handy, every now and then.

“Party animal?” he replied, more confused and shy than ever.

“It’s a Human expression,” she replied. “Means that once you get past all that shyness and being quiet, you really know how to have a good time.”

Varlin’s feathers ruffled furiously, and he stared down at his drink. “I don’t think so,” he said quietly, and there was an undercurrent of something in his voice that fascinated Chiana.

She made her decision, and held her hand out. “Come with me.”

~*~

  
There was no warning. One moment John was about to step out onto the walkway, the next there was a smoking hole where the wood had been, and Druinosi were screaming right and left, launching themselves into the air.

Aeryn grabbed him from behind and yanked him back into the semi-shelter of a large kavench tree, her pulse pistol already in her hand as if by magic. John palmed Winona quickly and crouched down next to Aeryn, shifting his aim back and forth warily.

The sky was filled with brightly colored Druinosi and shrieks of terror. No further explosions –

There. Another whoosh of pulse cannon, and the crackling of exploding wood. This one was out of sight, but now the bombardment came fast and furious. Acrid smoke rose into the air and screams of pain joined the ones of terror and then the repeated whoosh of the cannons and then the dull thuds of explosions in the distance, and the popping and creaking of closer explosions filled the air.

John tapped his comm and leaned down so that he could yell into it while Aeryn provided cover. There had been no further explosions near them, but based on empirical evidence that was more coincidence and luck than anything else.

“D’Argo! Chiana! Jool! Can anybody hear me?” He jerked away from the comm as static screamed out of it. Aeryn glanced at him and he shook his head grimly.

The kavench tree that contained the plaza they were kneeling in shuddered violently as the walkway John had been about to cross separated from the tree with a groan, its support system turned to slag by the pulse cannon. John’s mouth was suddenly dry as he remembered how he had earlier admired the workmanship of the walkways.

John glanced over his shoulder; the plaza they were in was one of the smaller ones, with perhaps two or three now-abandoned stalls. One of them had sold fruit, and a bag of the local equivalent of apples now lay on its side at Aeryn’s feet, abandoned and forgotten. Three paths led off from the other side of the plaza, one of which was burning and would clearly be completely unpassable in a matter of microts.

Aeryn was yelling in his ear over the incredible noise of the Druinosi screaming and the bombardment. “ – need to get back to the pod!”

John nodded in agreement, and they backed into the plaza, standing up straight once in the relative safety of the kavench tree.

Aeryn glanced at the two navigable walkways and then back at John. He gestured to the left one, referencing the mental map he’d been constructing in his head. It had always been a hobby of his, with the mind that had delighted MIT with its ability to visualize 3D concepts. A stray line of thought commented on how few words he and Aeryn had exchanged and still how well they worked together.

They crossed the plaza and were halfway across before John paused. One of the vendors had sold heavy cloth packs, and he crossed to the abandoned stall and began to look for one that would sling across his back and still afford freedom of movement. Aeryn followed his lead, filling one she found with the now-bruised fruit that was littered across the plaza.

Packs filled, they stood at the exit of the plaza and prepared to cross the walkway. The bombardment had, if anything, increased, and the smoke content of the air was reaching the point where it would soon become difficult to breathe.

A dash across the walkway and they entered another, smaller, plaza, at which point John gestured to a sharp right. They continued in this pattern through four more plazas; dash, survey the next walkway, dash, survey…

In the last plaza they found several other off-worlders. There were no Druinosi to be seen; all had taken flight with the initial bombardment, avian instinct telling them that they would be safer in the air.

“Frelling Peacekeepers!” a Sheyang shouted at them, shaking his fist.

“We’re not Peacekeepers,” Aeryn replied in a measured voice, her pulse pistol still gripped firmly in her hand. “What happened here?”

“Marauder crew,” a Delvian said from where he crouched next to his herbal stall, his voice mellifluous and sad. “They’re reducing Anlach City to rubble.”

“Why?” John asked, his voice astonished and pained, though claws of dread reached up from his stomach to clutch at his throat.

“We don’t know yet,” the Delvian replied, and at that moment the bombardment stopped as suddenly as it had begun. The silence, pierced only by organic calls of pain, was eerie and startling.

A hush fell over the small crowd in the plaza, and Aeryn moved to one of the exits, trying to survey what was going on outside. John tucked in close to her and, unwilling to disturb the dead silence that had fallen over the plaza, whispered in her ear.

“They’re looking for us,” he said with utter certainty.

“You don’t know that,” Aeryn hissed back, her eyes trying to pick out shapes in the smoke that swirled through the city.

“Yes, I do,” he said sadly. Nothing but death and destruction in his wake…

Aeryn sighed in exasperation and edged out of the exit a little more, arms held in front of her and pulse pistol swinging back and forth in a defensive posture.

“Let this serve as an example,” a voice boomed through the settlement, obviously being amplified from wherever the Marauder had landed. “You have harbored a group of fugitives, chief among them the human John Crichton.”

John squeezed his eyes shut in pain. It didn’t happen often, but for once he would have liked to be wrong about the pain he inflicted on others.

“Unless you present him to us within the arn, we will completely destroy what remains of your primitive settlement.”

Primitive. It was the same word Rygel had used to describe the level of technology on Druinos. But John remembered the engineering of the walkways, now reduced to charred remains by Peacekeeper pulse cannons.

“The countdown begins now.” There was a feedback whine and a click as the amplifier turned off. Aeryn and John slid back inside the plaza to face the hostile faces of the offworlders.

“Who the frell is this John Crichton?” an old Sebacean asked angrily. “He’s not worth all this.”

“Didn’t you hear?” the Delvian asked, his voice almost smug. “He destroyed one of their command carriers. The most wanted man in the Uncharted Territories. And now they’ve set the Ghosts on him.” The shopkeeper laughed, a dry, brittle sound. “We’re lucky we got off this easy. Let us hope that the city council turns him in quickly. I assure you, the Peacekeepers would have no compunctions about reducing this city to ash.”

John swallowed against the knot in his throat and turned to Aeryn just as his comm. crackled to life.

“Crichton!” D’Argo yelled in a tone that was clearly audible across the entire plaza.

~*~

  
Jool huddled in the gap behind the transport pod, a pulse rifle balanced across her knees. Her comms weren’t working and she had no idea where the others were. She’d grown bored of the planet half an arn ago and had returned to the docking bay only to find that the authorities refused to let her board the transport pod without the metal chip that was in Aeryn’s possession.

And then the shooting had started, and all the Druinosi had taken to the air, leaving her alone. She’d searched through the offices and found the pulse pistol that she now cradled.

The Peacekeeper announcement cut across the city, and Jool closed her eyes. More people dead because of them. She was a scholar, frell it all, not a mercenary, and she was sick of blood following in her wake because of the people who had stolen her from the medical facility.

On the good days, she remembered that those same people had saved her life, and had given her a home when they had every reason to throw her out the nearest airlock. But this was most certainly not one of the good days.

“Jool!” D’Argo’s voice echoed across the docking bay, and she leapt to her feet, the pulse rifle clattering across the resin floor. Swearing, she dropped back down to her knees and grabbed the rifle, bringing it up to train at the air in front of her. You never know, was the motto she had learned since waking up in Moya’s cargo bay.

Fortunately for her nerves, the Luxan warrior came into her sight. She stood up again and stalked toward him.

“What is going on?” she yelled. “Why does this happen to us, every frelling planet? Why are we always killing people and destroying things?”

From the lines of fatigue in D’Argo’s stance, he was wondering the same thing, but he only had the energy for a “Shut up, Jool” before he crossed to the transport pod and entered.

She noticed then that Rygel was floating along behind D’Argo, his throne sled weighted down with purchases.

“I hope your shopping wasn’t inconvenienced,” she snarled at him before following D’Argo up the steps.

“Not at all,” Rygel replied as he followed her into the pod.

D’Argo was accessing the comms. Of course – she should have thought of that. The pod’s communications system was a great deal more powerful than their individual comm. badges, and could very well work when the smaller badges wouldn’t.

“Crichton!” he yelled into the comm., anxiety in his voice.

~*~

  
Chiana saw it before it happened. She was getting awfully sick of that.

_ Smell of plasma discharge in the air - heat of fire beating on your skin - sounds of panicked screams - wheezing, coughing through the smoke -_

She reeled backwards, knocking over her drink as she tried to grip the table. After the suddenly overpowering noise of the vision, even the raucous carousing of the bar sounded hollow and tinny, and the sudden return to uncomplicated sight made her dizzy.

“Chiana? Are you all right?” Varlin’s hands hovered over her, unsure of what to do. She appreciated that, though she had an urge to swat him away.

Deep, shuddering breath. “Something’s going to happen, something horrible.” Her hands found firm grip on the edge of the table and Chiana pulled herself up, stumbling toward the exit of the bar. She was pretty sure Varlin was following her, but it didn’t matter so much.

_ John - have to get to John - _

Too late. By the time she reached the door the shooting had started and her vision had become horribly, frighteningly true.

Energy discharge screamed through the air and collided with the kavench tree the bar was housed in. There was the smell, the screams, the heat, the smoke -

And then everything went black.

~*~

  
“You’re Crichton?” The old Sebacean male snarled from where he crouched down next to his stall. Aeryn’s response was to put her back to the wall and train her pulse pistol on the offworlders sharing the plaza with them as well as the walkway they had just been surveying to leave via. Don’t even think about it.

The Sebacean twisted his scarred face into a look of pure hatred and fury and a small part of Aeryn didn’t really blame him. But the larger part of her had focused into act - react and protect. Crichton called it Peacekeeper mode. I am what I was bred to be.

Beside her, he was responding to D’Argo’s comm and trying to formulate some sort of plan. Aeryn kept her gaze shifting from suspect to suspect. The Sebacean, the Sheyang, the Delvian. A few Ilanics, huddled in the corner.

“I don’t think we can get to you,” Crichton was saying into his comm, his eyes rising briefly to meet hers and then falling back down to the comm badge. “Have you heard from Chiana yet?” A twist of his lips into a grimace as D’Argo responded in the negative. The Sheyang shifted his weight and Aeryn swung the pulse pistol back to him. Just to be sure.

“Where did the Marauder land? Can we get a fix on the Peacekeepers’ locations?”

_ Success measured by body count_.

Aeryn wondered what kind of body count would qualify a commando team for assignment to John Crichton.

“They’ve landed close to you,” D’Argo warned. “The message was broadcast about a hundred metras away from your current position.”

“Frell,” John hissed. “Options?” He looked up, including her in his thought process.

Their gazes met. Aeryn watched the idea flicker in John’s blue eyes and telegraphed her agreement with whatever plan he came up with, because she certainly didn’t have any ideas of her own.

“D’Argo, we’re going to create a diversion and draw them away from the city. Make our way past the outlying settlements into the forest and then try to double back and ambush them.” His voice was hard, without emotion. Ambush a crack commando team? Once upon a time Aeryn had believed there would be an end to the breathtaking risk of Crichton’s plans. She’d learned better since.

Still, it was the only thing she could think of at the moment as well. And it took the Marauder away from the city, away from the innocents who had died here today. The doctrine of her childhood had told her that there were no innocents in war. That was yet another thing she had learned better.

Crichton’s eyes met hers for just an instant, but long enough for a thousand unspoken words to pass between them. She nodded in agreement.

John tapped the comm again. “See you on the other side, D.”

Whatever reply D’Argo may have had was swallowed by static.

~*~

Chiana came back to consciousness with a pounding headache and black streaks dancing at the edges of her eyesight. She licked her lips only to discover that her tongue had no moisture either, and blinked in a futile attempt to clear her vision.

Varlin’s face appeared over her and she had a moment of panic before she recognized him. “What…what the frell happened?” she asked.

“Peacekeepers,” Varlin said grimly. “They’ve destroyed almost the entire city. They say they’re looking for someone named John Crichton.”

_D’Argo had it so right - every frelling planet…_Chiana groaned and tried to pull herself to a sitting position, failing miserably as the dizziness threatened to drag her back down into oblivion.

“Don’t try to move yet.” Varlin’s crown feathers rustled nervously, and he clacked his beak in what Chiana assumed was an admonitory sound. “You hit your head so badly when you fell I was afraid you wouldn’t wake up at all.”

“Was the bar hit?” Varlin nodded. “How badly?”

“Not as badly as some of the other places I’ve seen. We’re the only ones here, though. All the Druinosi have flown away. The walkways caught fire when they hit the bar and they aren’t safe to cross anymore.” Varlin disappeared from her narrow field of vision for a moment, and returned with a cup that he pressed to her lips. “Here, drink something.”

Chiana swallowed, choking and sputtering as some of the water trickled down her windpipe. Every fraction of movement as she coughed sent waves of splitting pain through her head until she was finally able to breathe normally again. “I have to go,” she said urgently.

“Didn’t you hear me?” Varlin’s complete confusion would have been endearing if she hadn’t been so desperate to get to John as soon as possible. “The walkways are burning. They’re going to be nothing but ash within microts. And the Peacekeepers are still out there somewhere. And you can’t move more than a dench! We can’t leave.”

“Then I have to contact them, somehow – my comm. - ”

Varlin shook his head and held out his hand. Somehow her comm. Had been smashed when she fell. She wouldn’t have had a hope of repairing it even had it been suffering from a simple wiring malfunction, and what she was looking at now resembled nothing so much as random scraps of twisted metal that had once been a compact communication system.

She was completely separated from the rest of the group.

The realization sunk in to Chiana about the same time as her body refused to stay conscious any longer, and her last thought as her eyes closed involuntarily was one of overwhelming guilt; John was in trouble and she couldn’t go to him.

~*~

“See you on the other side, D.”

“Crichton!” Jool fumed at the transport pod’s control panel, wishing the irritating human were there so that she could yell at him in person. A squeal of static was her only answer as the comm. System was finally unable to track Crichton’s signal.

“They’re gone,” Rygel intoned pompously, “but we can still save ourselves. Lift off now, while the Marauder is otherwise occupied.”

“We’re not going anywhere,” D’Argo said. “Crichton and Aeryn are counting on us to be there for them when they get back. And Chiana is still out there somewhere. We have to find her.”

“They’re not _coming_ back! Did you hear them? The frelnik thinks he can outwit a commando team by running through the woods!” Rygel again, in his best I-was-a-Dominar voice of outrage.

“He did it once before,” D’Argo replied, and he was already shutting down the transport pod. “If we lift off now, the Marauder will be able to track us. They will assume we have Crichton, and they will chase us and capture us.”

“He doesn’t have the benefit of the heat this time,” Rygel argued more furiously, though he knew he was fighting a losing battle, and out of spite he moved his throne sled to where he could yell directly in the Luxan’s ear.

D’Argo swatted Rygel back and he careened across the transport pod before hitting a wall and coming to a stop. Rygel cursed at him in Hynerian, but remained otherwise quiet.

“We have to help these people,” Jool said suddenly, breaking her silence. “Can you hear that?” Even through the walls of the transport pod they could hear the sounds of wood exploding as fire reached sap pockets, and the pained groans of the thousands injured in the assault.

D’Argo’s look was appreciative and in total agreement. “Once we are sure that the Marauder crew follows Crichton and Aeryn, we can try to put right some of the misery we’ve caused here.” He touched the pocket that held the data chip and sent out a silent promise of death to Macton Tal – but not just yet. “We don’t know how long it will take them to dispatch the commandoes.” He spoke with assurance, but all three of them were thinking the same thing. _If they come back._

“For now, we wait.”

~*~

“We need some way of letting them know where we are so that we can draw them away,” Crichton said, setting the comm. Down on the ground and prying off the cover to begin fiddling with its insides.

Aeryn was already walking over to the Delvian’s stall, keeping her pulse pistol trained on the other temporary denizens of the plaza. “We’re going to need supplies.”

“I would be glad to help,” the Delvian volunteered. “You may take what you need – I have no great love of the Peacekeepers. Entirely the opposite. They enslaved my world.”

“I know,” she replied quietly, thinking of Zhaan, and her sacrifice. A disturbing thought occurred to her briefly – _Am I wasting that sacrifice? She died for the love of me, and now…_ Ruthlessly, she pushed that regret to the back of her mind. “I traveled for a time with Pa’u Zotoh Zhaan.”

“Truly?” The Delvian’s eyes were fierce and full of pride. “She performed a great service for our people when she rid us of that monster.”

Aeryn smiled briefly, wryly, and tossed a few of the coins she had with her to the Delvian. No need of them where she was going, and she saw no reason to leave him without some compensation.

“These preserve well,” the Delvian said, passing her a bundle of herbs. “These act as a mild analgesic. And these are a stimulant, but only for short term bursts. Be careful not to overuse them.” Aeryn tucked the herbs into her bag, apportioning the space.

Crichton joined her a few microts later, passing her a pack of oddly colored food cubes that he had taken from an abandoned stall. “I’ve reconfigured the comms to broadcast a wide dispersal transmission – the Peacekeepers should hear that quite easily and will be able to track the initial signal. After that we’ll have to try and find other ways of helping them to track us.” He grimaced, and slung his now-full pack over his shoulder.

“Filthy criminal,” the Sebacean snarled from their left. “Running away from the scene and leaving Anlach City in ashes. Are you always so cowardly?”

Aeryn glanced over at him briefly from where he huddled behind his junk parts stall, and she noticed that the tension in Crichton’s shoulders had begun anew.

The Sebacean let out a feral yell and launched himself toward them. He had traveled perhaps a few metras when Aeryn drew her pulse pistol in one smooth movement and fired, almost carelessly.

The blast hit him in the center of his chest and jerked him backward in the air. His body fell lifelessly and slid for a few denches, leaving a pink smear of blood on the wood floor. There was a terrified whimper from the huddle of Ilanics in the corner, but otherwise the plaza was completely silent, and only the noises from outside were audible.

Crichton swallowed convulsively, his hand stilling on the packet of herbs he’d been about to put in his pack and then resuming movement swiftly, tying off the cord so tightly Aeryn wasn’t sure they would be able to undo it in a hurry.

“Thank you for your help,” he said hoarsely to the Delvian, and moved to the door, Aeryn following him, her own pack settled comfortably on her shoulders and her pulse pistol still trained on the other offworlders. Still no one spoke, and one of the Ilanics could not take his eyes off the body on the floor.

Crichton tapped the comm. Once and brought it to his mouth to make his words clear over the noise from outside.

“This is John Crichton. I know you can track this signal, and I have only one thing to say to you. If you want me, you’re going to have to come and get me.”

Crichton closed the channel and pinned the comm. Badge back to his vest. He nodded at Aeryn and together they moved fluidly across the plaza and out onto the walkway.

~*~

It was evening before Chiana woke again, and she found herself able to see more clearly this time. She was propped upright between a corner of the bar and the wall and cocooned in a thick blanket that smelled overwhelmingly like hard liquor. Presumably Varlin had found it somewhere when it grew colder, but now that she was awake and paying attention to the odors that reached her nose, she found it stifling.

A brief test found her more easily able to move her limbs this time, and she was able to shove the blanket away from her, though now exposed to the night air she shivered slightly. When she got cold enough she could get the blanket back again, but for now she wanted to breathe clean air.

Well, as clean as she could get it, anyway. Every breath she took was tainted with the rancid smell of smoke and ozone from the pulse blasts, and when she inhaled too deeply it tickled at her lungs, causing her to cough convulsively and bringing a wave of dizziness when she moved her head too quickly.

Varlin was gone, and for some reason she was slightly surprised and saddened to find herself alone. In retrospect she should have expected him to leave her, but there had still been something about the young Druinosi that had almost reminded her of Crichton when had first come to them – naïve, well-intentioned, and ultimately the kind of person who would come through in the end. She was usually a good judge of character, too, but finally had to shrug away her confusion.

At least he had gone to the pain of tucking the blanket around her before leaving. And it wasn’t like she blamed him. If she could fly, she’d have tried to leave too. Well, probably after making sure whoever she was with was okay. But he had made sure she was okay.

_And now I’m talking myself in circles._ That made her think of Crichton, and reaching up to grasp the edge of the bar, she pulled herself to an unsteady standing position, clutching the blanket to her for warmth. A few experimental steps brought her to the door of the bar, where she had entered by way of one of the side thoroughfares.

Anlach City hadn’t been brightly lit during the day, because of the thick canopy blocking most of the sunlight, and now that the sun had set she could barely see anything. To a city girl like herself, the nearly pitch black was unnerving, and she guessed that on any normal night, the city would have been alive with light and sound.

Smoke still drifted from many of the kavench trees, slanting in the faint lights that some brave citizens had placed at the entrances of the larger plaza trees – presumably so the Druinosi could have enough vision to land.

Where there had once been a slim wooden walkway was now empty space, and Chiana closed her eyes against the staggering drop only a few denches from her feet. She couldn’t tell how many of the graceful walkways were still intact, but from the intense bombardment the Peacekeepers had likely inflicted on the city, she didn’t have much hope for the remains of the local infrastructure.

There was nothing she could do from here, and she was only exposing herself as a target, and so she turned back to the bar, shifting the liquor-laden blanket so it settled across her shoulders in a welcome, warm weight.

A search of the area behind the bar revealed an ample supply of intoxicants – including a few she hadn’t seen on the bar menu, quite likely special orders for certain patrons – and a locked safe. The sliver of metal she kept inside her boot at all times made short work of the lock, and in the safe she discovered a sizeable stack of money, that she dumped on the floor in search of something that would actually be useful to her in her present situation.

There – a small, compact pulse pistol and a few extra chakkan oil cartridges. Chiana made a quick check of the firing mechanism and barrel, using lessons learned long ago from Aeryn, and was able to discern that while the weapon wouldn’t win any efficiency prizes, and had likely been retired from active production well over fifty cycles ago, it would still shoot in a more or less straight line and on command.

Continuing along she found enough food to keep her well-fed for several days, while perhaps not nutritionally balanced – most of what was stored there was snacks and finger foods for bar patrons. At the far end of the bar from where she’d started her search, though, was her second prize.

Chiana ran her fingers over the Druinosi communications system, completely unsure of how to work its strange controls, but equally sure that she would have the time to find out.

“It’s just you and me, isn’t it?” she said aloud to the mechanism, and her voice echoed in the empty bar.

~*~

“You commando types are really not all you’re cracked up to be, are you?” Crichton’s voice was light and mocking, but Aeryn could tell that there was more than a hint of exhaustion underneath. They’d been playing this cat and mouse game among the ruins of Anlach city for four arns now, slowly moving toward the edge of the city. They were resting now in a plaza that was barely a tenth of the size of the one they had started out from, but was twice the size of any they had seen for the past arn.

Abandoned plaza after abandoned plaza, burned and gutted walkways, and stalls in disarray had been all they’d seen for the past two arns. In the initial stages of their journey they had from time to time come across other flightless alien inhabitants of the city, but no words had been exchanged, only furtive glances across a plaza, and then John and Aeryn had moved on after a brief search of the abandoned stalls to see if they provided anything useful.

Nerves were on edge; Aeryn would have preferred a straight firefight to all of this skulking around, but she had no idea of how to go about that in a city whose only thoroughfares were walkways suspended between trees. And if the areas they’d seen so far were any indication of the rest of Anlach City’s location, well over half of those walkways were unusable.

Because they weren’t going anywhere specific, they hadn’t yet encountered any problems with dead ends because of missing walkways. When they did, they simply doubled back as far as was needed and took another route. So far their longest retreat had cost them nearly three quarters of an arn in backtracking, and Aeryn had been on edge the entire time, half expecting to emerge into a plaza to find the Marauder crew entrenched and waiting for them.

“Catch me if you can,” Crichton taunted, and closed the channel.

Judging from the increasingly small size of the plazas, Aeryn thought they would be on the true edges of the city within the arn. At that point, they had no further plans than to find a way to descend to the surface of the planet and face the commandoes on flat ground, carefully pacing their flight and taking all opportunities for ambush that presented themselves.

Likely there was a better way to go about this, but Aeryn couldn’t see one at the moment, and she was willing to trust in Crichton to translate the chaos of his plans in a way that somehow always worked, even if it was hardly ever the way intended.

The old familiar grief washed over her, and there was an echo of sympathy pain in her chest. Since the assault she had been fully immersed in Peacekeeper mode, falling into the easy bond that she and Crichton had always shared, even in their most strained moments. She’d told him that, hadn’t she? _“We always worked well together.”_

Not now, she told her errant thoughts. Now was not the time to let her emotions intrude. They had a job to do, innocent lives to try to protect, and even after four exhausting arns of chase, the hardest part was still ahead of them.

Selecting a path, Crichton moved on ahead and Aeryn followed.

~*~

Jool descended cautiously, pulse pistol wavering in her unsteady hand.

“Hello? Is anybody out there?” She waved the pulse pistol around the docking bay in a manner she hoped would discourage anyone from shooting at her. She’d seen the others handle their weapons in a warning fashion often enough that she hoped she could provide at least a decent sham of it.

There was no response, and she judged it safe to take a few more steps down the ladder, finally setting foot to the hard resin floor and moving a few denches away from the transport pod.

“There’s no one here,” she called back, and in a fit of pique, added, “I still don’t understand why I had to go first.”

“Because you’re expendable,” Rygel snarled back, and Jool indulged herself briefly in a fantasy of twisting one of the little slug’s earbrows until he yelped in pain.

D’Argo didn’t answer, but followed her down the ladder, qualta rifle cautiously in hand.

“I told you there was no one here,” she grumbled at him, hurt by his lack of trust in her judgement.

“I wanted to see for myself,” was his simple answer. “We need to reach a central point – the government areas, or the larger shopping centers.”

Jool gestured vaguely to a slightly charred walkway that led to the left. “The largest shopping centers are in that direction. I have no idea about the government buildings.” She turned back to the transport pod and yelled up into it. “Rygel, throw me down the med kit.”

A cloth bag came flying at her, and she barely had time to snatch it out of the air before it hit her face. “When this is all over, I intend to do something exceedingly unpleasant to you, slug.”

“If you return,” Rygel replied, his voice floating down from the inside of the pod. “What you are going to do is pure suicide.”

Jool chose to ignore that, and hit the control to retract the ladder. Rygel had adamantly refused to come with them to help the injured inhabitants of the city, saying that he would be much more useful guarding the transport pod.

As furious as both Jool and D’Argo had been with him, he had had a point. The transport pod was their only way of getting off the planet, and in the complete anarchy that was sure to be reigning over Anlach City, there was a good chance that an opportunistic looter would find the transport pod too good a prize to pass up.

“Considering we have no idea how to get to the government areas, I think the main shopping center would be our best option,” D’Argo said, and they set off down the path, Jool making a face at the taste of ash in her mouth and the acidity of smoke in her nose.

~*~

After half an arn of poking, Chiana was able to get the communications device to emit a high-pitched squeal. She let it screech for a few microts, glad of anything to break the almost oppressive quiet that had settled over the city, and then twisted the dial back into silence.

“That’s a start, anyway,” she said. She’d been talking aloud to herself since beginning work on the device, finding that her voice was comforting, even if it had originally seemed extremely odd to be talking to herself. It was really something Crichton did.

A noise from outside attracted her attention, and she paused to listen for a moment to ascertain if it was a threat or not. When it grew in intensity and moved closer to her, Chiana snatched up the pulse pistol, crouching in a defensive position behind the bar.

“Chiana?” At the sound of the familiar voice, Chiana stood back up, a scowl on her face.

“Varlin, you frelnik, where were you?” she demanded angrily. Instinct kept the pulse pistol trained on the Druinosi, but she was incredibly glad to see him.

“I wanted to see the extent of the damage,” he said, spreading his arms wide. “I thought you would sleep for a lot longer – why are you pointing that at me? Where did you find it?”

“It’s ah – just a habit, I suppose,” she said by way of apology, and set the pulse pistol down on the bar. “I found it in a safe underneath the bar.”

“How did you get in the safe?” Varlin asked, his voice completely incredulous. “No, wait – don’t answer that. How are you feeling?”

“Better,” she said, easing out from behind the bar. “Thank you for this,” she said, gesturing with an elbow to indicate the blanket she still had wrapped around her. Varlin nodded in acknowledgement. “How bad is the damage?”

Varlin’s crest feathers drooped, and he rustled his wings in sadness. “It’s very bad.”

“I’m so sorry,” Chiana whispered, feeling tears sting her eyes.

Varlin shrugged. “It wasn’t your fault. They’re Peacekeepers. They don’t need a reason. If you need someone to blame, blame John Crichton. He’s the one they destroyed Anlach City to get at.”

Chiana opened and closed her mouth, ducking to the side in discomfort. “Actually, Varlin…it is kind of my fault. I’m here with John Crichton, and the Peacekeepers are probably looking for me, too.”

~*~

“This is as far as we can go,” Crichton observed, looking out the window into the empty forest beyond.

“How are we going to get down to the surface?” Aeryn asked, holstering her pulse pistol and moving next to him to look out the window. They were in a small end plaza that as far as they could tell had been a lodging.

“I don’t even know how far up the tree we are,” he replied, and moved away from the window. Aeryn felt a small pang of loss when he moved out her personal space, mixed in with an odd relief, and once again reached inside of her to bring the void up to swallow those emotions. Right now she needed to focus on the problem at hand.

“We should see how far down we can get within this particular tree.” Aeryn gestured at a spiraling staircase that curved around the outside of the trunk as far down as they could see. “After that, we may have to climb down. Somehow.”

This was the point at which their plan evinced serious flaws. Aeryn had extensive rock climbing experience, but she couldn’t even begin to fathom how to apply the practiced, controlled precision of rappelling and finding handholds and footholds to the slick, uniform trunk of the massive kavench trees.

They had found rope and grappling equipment, but until they could discern how far it was to the surface, those supplies were more or less useless. There was the ghost of the hope that the Druinosi had some sort of mechanism for descending to the surface, but Aeryn didn’t put much faith in possibilities for that sort of pedestrian travel coming from an avian species.

None of the buildings they had been traveling through for the past arn had been damaged by the assault, which had focused on the center of the city. Crichton had mumbled something about yuppie suburbs that Aeryn had tried for a microt or two to make sense of, but eventually had to come to the conclusion that it didn’t have any bearing on their current dilemma.

They descended the stairs at a brisk pace, light footed and staying close to the trunk of the tree. There was no railing along the outside or the inside, and Aeryn’s stomach turned at the thought of the consequences of one slip. She kept a careful eye on Crichton’s balance, readying herself to grab at him should he slip as he jogged down the stairs in front of her. If she’d been leading she would have opted for a much slower pace, but since finding empty house after empty house Crichton had been filled with an almost manic energy.

Aeryn understood it, even shared it to a certain degree, even if she didn’t see it as just cause to move so quickly down the dangerous staircase. Crichton had sent his last transmission a quarter arn ago, leaning against the base of a wooden sculpture in the center of plaza that had obviously been part of an affluent neighborhood. They’d heard the distinctive sounds of pulse pistols within a hundred metras of their position, and they had been moving fast since then.

There was a sense of urgency haunting their steps that grew with every empty place they had encountered. They’d only spent an arn or two in the city before the Peacekeepers had arrived – hardly any time, but long enough to appreciate the beauty and the peace of the place, and to feel a desolate loss at the complete abandonment that they found. Neither had spoken of where the Druinosi who had lived in those places were now. Alive, somewhere, but with their lives forever changed because of the crew’s visit.

Crichton wavered dangerously as he set a foot wrong, and Aeryn reached out to grab a fistful of his jacket, bracing herself and yanking him hard back toward the tree. They rested in silence for a moment, cheeks pressed up against the bark, eyes on each other’s. Aeryn was surprised to find herself breathing heavily from the split second adrenaline rush, and she swallowed hard against the sudden nauseous pit in her stomach. That momentary fright had been more than she wanted to experience again and had threatened to completely undermine the careful control she had been building.

“Thanks,” Crichton whispered, and Aeryn let go of his jacket slowly, willing her hand not to shake as she brought it back to her side. He closed his eyes and drew in a shuddering breath, and then turned and continued down the stairs – considerably slower, Aeryn was pleased to note.

~*~

The main shopping center plaza was in one of the largest kavench trees of the entire city, and it was humming with activity when Jool and D’Argo arrived. Druinosi and offworlders mingled and moved quickly from prone body to prone body, and groans of pain filled the air.

Jool stood frozen for a moment as the sounds of pain and the smells of burnt flesh filled her senses, and she was swamped with a wave of terror. If D’Argo hadn’t been there she would have been tempted to just turn and run, but he stood just behind her, an immovable Luxan wall. She was reminded of their growing closeness and his faith in her, and firmly telling the panicked part of her mind that even if she hadn’t been trained for this, she had to try anyway.

She approached the closest official-looking Druinosi and touched his shoulder to gain his attention. Before he could bark at her for interrupting him, she explained in a rush.

“I have some medical experience and I brought these supplies and I want to help.” Jool wasn’t quite sure how that had all come out on one breath, but the words were said and she watched relief cross the Druinosi’s feather-patterned face.

“Go see Wastren, there, with the gold-and-red patterning. He’ll assign you patients to look after. Are you here to help nurse too?” He addressed the last question to D’Argo, who stepped back defensively, almost seeming to ward off the Druinosi with his hands.

“Oh – noooo, not me,” he said, in a frightened tone that was at odds with his muscular appearance. “I can help to carry, and to clear debris.”

The Druinosi nodded curtly. “Your assistance is greatly appreciated.” He gestured with a spindly arm toward a group of sturdy offworlders and Druinosi gathered near one of the exits. “They are about to leave to go on scouting parties among the other plazas to find more injured and try to impose a sort of order in Anlach City.” His feathers planed flat in sadness, and his wings drooped briefly.

“We’ll make it right.” Jool was slightly startled to hear the reassuring words coming out of her mouth. The Druinosi smiled at her and then moved away, half a dozen others calling for his attention.

“Stay in touch by comms,” D’Argo warned her. “They should work again now that the assault is over.”

Jool nodded, and moved to ask Wastren where she could help. She was directed to a row of injured Druinosi and offworlders, ranging from soundly unconscious to actively writhing in pain.

Kneeling down beside the first patient, a young Druinosi who stared up at her imploringly, blood flowing steadily from a wound on his thigh and broken feathers all around his midsection.

“Hello.” That was as good a start as any. “I – ah, I’m going to just try and stop the bleeding.” He still didn’t make a sound, just blinked solemnly, and Jool turned to a pile of bandages that Wastren had pointed out to her, selecting a size that would more or less work well and reaching in her med kit for antiseptic cleaner so she could start to ascertain the size of the wound.

“Well, the bleeding seems to be slowing down on its own quite nicely,” she said nervously, pressing the bandage tightly against the wound and discovering that the flow of blood was now sluggish to nonexistent. She glanced up with a small smile on her face to reassure the child, but again he didn’t react. His eyes were flat and empty and his beak opened slackly. He was dead.

~*~

“What do you mean, you came here with John Crichton?” Varlin reared back from her, his voice shaky and frightened. “Are you some kind of criminal?”

“That’s a lot harder to answer than you think,” Chiana answered, only now realizing how tenuous their status really was.

“If you’re not a criminal, then why are they hunting you? I don’t understand!”

She felt for him, really she did. He was so innocent, so rooted in simplistic definitions and understandings and so used to trusting people. In this moment he reminded her more of the Crichton she had first met than ever.

“Look, it’s a really long story,” she warned. “The short version of it is yes, to the Peacekeepers we are criminals. But since when has anyone expected a fair judgement from the Peacekeepers?” Even as she tried to reassure Varlin, her mind whirled and tried to sort out his question.

Were they criminals? The ink had barely been dry on their pardons when they’d turned around and blown up the Command Carrier. Fifty thousand people, and normally Chiana wouldn’t have cared so much, but she’d spent too much time around Aeryn to think that all Peacekeepers were vicious killers. Most of them, yes, but she’d seen the faces of the children on the Carrier.

And that was only the most recent incident. The Gammak base, the shadow depository, so many other small engagements that had resulted in blood spilled and work destroyed. Chiana had never really stopped to think about how much their path through the Uncharted Territories had added up – usually her place was just to lend her energy and particular skills to the situation. Now that she reflected she found herself deeply unsettled, and didn’t like it.

And now, this. They’d stopped for supplies and that simple errand had turned into the death and destruction of Anlach City. Chiana watched Varlin’s face as he tried to process the information, and to his credit, he didn’t turn around and leave her stranded.

“What could be so horrible that the Peacekeepers would destroy my home to get you?” Varlin still hadn’t moved, pack of supplies falling slackly from one taloned hand. He sounded so incredibly lost. Chiana had a strong suspicion that her revelation was coinciding with the wearing off of the initial shock glaze the attack had caused in him.

“The Peacekeepers don’t play fair,” she told him, moving around the bar slowly and approaching him, sensing that the break was imminent. “And they don’t care about who gets hurt. They just care about getting what you want. They’ve been chasing us for cycles and they keep killing and killing to get at us, and they just don’t care.”

A shudder wracked Varlin’s body and he let the cloth bag fall to the floor. Chiana took the last few steps to reach him and awkwardly reached out to him though he outmassed her by a factor of two to one. She held him as he cried, and couldn’t stop thinking about what Crichton had told her when she’d been facing the loss of her brother. _ “Since when do people like us get what we want?”_

~*~

The stairs ended abruptly in charred slag, about twenty denches from the jagged remains of the landing of the last entrance into the tree. Crichton had seen it well before and slowed accordingly, coming to a stop a few steps up from where a stray shot had apparently struck this part of the kavench tree.

“Moment of truth,” he said quietly, and almost involuntarily Aeryn looked up the stairs behind her. This was the point at which their plan could go most horribly wrong, and from their past experiences with luck she would have expected the entire commando team to round the tree, pistols blazing, at just that moment.

Almost idly, Crichton stomped on one of the half-burned steps, separating it from the trunk of the tree and sending it spiraling downward into the pitch black. The sun had been in the throes of setting when they had begun their journey down the tree and it had been full dark for the past arn.

Within a few microts they heard a rustling sound as the block of wood hit the forest floor.

“We are not that lucky,” Crichton breathed, his tone incredulous. He kicked another piece of wood and counted as it plummeted downward. “Seven microts. Gravity being more or less equal, all things considered we’re not more than a hundred metras from the surface.”

“The rope is easily twice that,” Aeryn said, already pulling it out of her pack and testing the knots that held the metal grappling hook to it with a series of sharp tugs. It held perfectly. “Where should we tie it off?”

“The steps have been holding our weight the whole way down. We should be safe tying it off close to the trunk.” Crichton darted up a few steps, stopping Aeryn’s heart for a microt, and reached out his hand for the grappling hook. She withheld it for a moment, still concerned.

“How do we know what’s down there?” she asked.

“Huh.” Crichton seemed to consider that for a moment and then unholstered Winona and fired a few shots down into the dark and watched an illuminated tunnel travel down parallel to the trunk and then splash into the ground, sparks showering in all directions when the blast slammed into the floor. There was frantic rustling and then silence again. “Nothing, now.”

Aeryn mock-glared at him, and the corners of his mouth twisted in a mischievous grin. She almost felt her lips twist in return, but with that moment of shared humor the pain came arcing in again, and she carefully smoothed her face into a blank expression, passing Crichton the grappling hook.

His shoulders slumped almost imperceptibly as he realized the split-microt of rapport was over, and accepted the metal hook, threading the rope between the steps and biting the metal firmly into the wood of the trunk and the stairs. In a careless gesture he threw the coil of rope over the side and they heard another rustle as the end of the rope hit the forest floor.

“I’ll go first,” Aeryn said abruptly, reaching over the side and gripping the rope firmly in her hands. “Cover me.” She swung her body weight over the side, pack carefully balanced between her shoulders and strapped at the small of her pack and was briefly in open air before momentum brought her back in a pendulum swing underneath the stairs, feet firmly planted against the trunk of the tree. She looked up into Crichton’s blue eyes, carefully not searching for a scar on his forehead, and began to descend.

~*~

Jool leaned her body weight onto her hand in a quick push and there was a give and scream of pain, and the leg bone slipped back into alignment. She rocked back on her heels and wiped the back of her hand across her forehead to clear it of the cold sweat that had prickled at the sound of that scream.

“You’re going to be fine,” she informed the female, of a species she wasn’t sure she had ever encountered before. The offworlder’s middle set of arms twitched feebly and her eyes rolled back in her head as she fainted dead away.

Jool’s only reaction to that was relief. She still had a good quarter arn of stitching and bandaging ahead of her and an arm to slide back into its socket. It really was much better for the female that she be unconscious for the procedure.

As her hands measured and cut the bandage and then selected and threaded a needle, she found herself remembering with ironic amusement a long ago xenobiology lecturer. He had been possessed of a deep, sonorous voice that had berated students in stenotarian tones against the foolishness of assuming an alien physiology would ever function in the same way’s an Interon’s would.

And nearly since the first moment she’d woken up from the cryogenic pod she had been forced to make snap assumptions about alien physiology, most often Crichton’s as he stumbled into the lab once more bleeding, broken, or aching. He was a magnet for trouble, the Human, and yet as Jool carefully held the puckered edges of the gash on the female’s leg closed and pierced the flesh with the needle to begin to sew the wound closed, she found that she missed him and sent a quick prayer to long-forgotten Interon gods on his and Aeryn’s behalf.

~*~

D’Argo raised the charred log over his shoulders and onto his back, crouching slightly to balance it between his shoulderblades as he carried it to a pile of similar logs and shifted to roll it on top of them. He straightened up with a back-cracking stretch.

Eight arns into his work with the repair crews and Anlach City was nearly pitch black save for the few scavenged lights that a team had begun to place at essential points radiating outward from the shopping center.

“You’ve been working hard, friend,” Nemali, the Druinosi who was coordinating the repair efforts in this section of the city, clapped his hand on D’Argo’s shoulder. “Take some time to go get something to eat, maybe take a nap. We need you alert and useful more than we need you sleepwalking!”

D’Argo nodded gratefully, too tired to form words to thank the Druinosi for his thought, and stumbled along one of the few intact main walkways to a large plaza that had been converted into a refugee center, crowded with bedding, huddled families, and with a spread of food along one curve of the arboreal wall.

Taking a local meat roll in one hand and a cup of some steaming beverage in the other, D’Argo found an unoccupied corner with a thin blanket and flat pillow, grateful for any sort of comfort he could scrape together. No sooner had he chewed the last bite and swallowed the last sip than he was sound asleep, his qualta bladed tucked protectively along his body and ready to use at a moment’s notice. As warm and welcoming as the Druinosi had proved themselves he had no intention of taking any chances.

~*~

Varlin opened his eyes and blinked a few times, inner eyelid receding as he came more fully awake. Chiana watched in fascination as he returned to full consciousness within microts.

"You fell asleep," she informed him, idly picking at the stitching on the blanket she'd used to cover him, a corner of which was draped across her lap. It still reeked of alcohol but it was large enough to have covered them both.

"I-I'm sorry," Varlin said ashamedly, and reached up to grasp the bar and pull himself into a sitting position.

"You had a long day," Chiana responded simply and rolled her shoulder in dismissal, feeling as she made the gesture the dampness of the cloth over her shoulder where Varlin had cried before succumbing to exhaustion.

"Still." Varlin was standing now, and extended his wings to stretch them out, nearly taking half the length of the bar. He arched his back as he stretched and then shook himself rigorously. One deep blue feather fell to the floor of the bar, and Chiana found herself leaning over to pick it up. It felt smooth and soft in her hands, and she was careful not to drop it as she stood up next to the Druinosi.

"You, ah - you dropped this," she said awkwardly, holding the feather out for him.

Varlin dropped his jaw in the Druinosi equivalent of a wide grin. "They don't go back. Do with that what you will."

Chiana traced the feather along her cheek and thought about how it was almost exactly the same shade as Nebari blood. "I'd like to keep it."

She wondered what color Druinosi blood was, and how much of it stained the ground of Anlach City.

~*~

"Well, it's been a few arns now and you still haven't caught us. What kind of commandos are making it through boot camp these days, huh? I'm disappointed." Crichton's tone was mocking and hard, and he was standing so rigidly he looked as if he might sprain a muscle by the sheer force of his posture. His grip tightened and relaxed on Winona, a compulsive kneading of the weapon's rigid exterior. "This is the last time I'm going to make it easy for you. We're on the forest floor, Peacekeepers. Come and get us." He dropped the comm onto a flat stone and crushed it under his heel. There was no sense in keeping it active to provide an even easier beacon for the commandos to zero in on. They were now blind.

Aeryn almost opened her mouth to tell Crichton that they would need to move as fast and as far as possible, but realized that he already understood that. Instead, she focused on logistics. "It's too dark to see anything. We're going to have to stay very closely together. Using a light would lead them right to us much faster than we want them to be."

He nodded, and slid the chakkan oil cartridge in and out of Winona in a nervous gesture. With the _snick_ of the cartridge sliding home, however, another sound echoed - louder and very close to them.

Aeryn immediately dropped into a crouch, pulse pistol trained in the direction the noise had come from, and John aimed Winona warily. Both were primed for an attack, but none came.

"Rabbit or something," Crichton said, his voice shaking slightly as he lowered Winona.

Aeryn chose not to ask what a rabbit was and focused on the more important fact of their situation. They had been awake for nearly twenty arns at this point. It seemed like cycles ago that she had woken up on Moya to a debate about stopping for food supplies. They were both tired, and the Peacekeeper commandos following them were quite likely still fresh.

There was another snap as of dry wood, from the same direction, followed by a faint trilling whistle.

"That's a Druinosi," Crichton said, and spoke for them both. He holstered his pistol and set off in the direction of the noise before Aeryn could warn him about unknown quantities and commando tricks. On the surface, she was exasperated at his risk-taking but there was a small part of her underneath that found comfort in the John Crichton she'd first met, the man who would question first and shoot later. She followed closely behind him so as not to lose sight of him completely in the pitch black.

"It's a child," Crichton said, his voice rough around the edges. "A she - and she's injured, badly. She must have fallen during the attack."

The Druinosi was a very young child, nearly a baby. She hadn't yet grown the proper musculature along her wing joints and shoulders that would one day enable her to fly, and her feathers were still nestled among soft baby down. One leg was twisted at an angle that didn't look physically possible and there was a large bump along one side of her head. The Druinosi let out one last trill and her eye rolled back into her head as she became unconscious.

Aeryn's hand almost strayed involuntarily to her stomach in sympathy but she gripped her pulse pistol tighter. "We have to do something, we have to help her."

John squinted upward, uselessly. The darkness was too pervasive to see more than a few metras, and there were no operative lights that would have at least indicated the location of a structure. "I don't know what we can do. Aeryn." He added her name almost as an afterthought, reaching out tentatively. She closed her eyes briefly against the pain of hearing his voice say her name, and then she continued, more determinedly.

"We can't just leave her here. She'll die. We'll have to take her with us." In her mind's eye, Aeryn could see the young girl on the Carrier, the girl she had been once, ambushed and beaten by her classmates. A moment's kindness on Aeryn's part had not been enough to save that girl, and Aeryn would forever remember ifs he had died when the Carrier went up in flames.

Crichton looked at her, penetratingly, but she held her ground. It would cause them untold difficulty, it would slow them down, and it might very well get them killed. But Aeryn wasn't ready to have any more deaths on her shoulders. There were so many names and faces in her. memory that no longer existed except as a wisp of thought. Her John. Xhalax. Zhaan. Crais and Talyn. Henta and the hundreds of men and women on the carrier she had worked with for so many cycles. All dead, all her fault to varying degrees. This child would not be added to that list. She set her shoulders and looked back at Crichton, really looked at him for the first time since she'd stepped down off the transport pod and had come face to face with a dead man.

She knew she had won the same way she always did. He might not be the same man she had loved, but he acted enough like him that she could still read him easily. His eyes softened and the tension in his shoulders eased slightly. "I'll carry her for now, but we'll have to make a sled or something before we go very far."

~*~

"Why don't you get some sleep." Jool blinked once, twice, and finally her vision was clear enough to recognize the face of the Druinosi whose hand was resting gently on her shoulder. Ajna, the dark female who had taken over from Wastren when he had left to supervise another newly opened emergency facility once the work crews had clearned to another large plaza.

"I just - I - " Jool looked down at her hands and laid them flat against the pile of bandaging to keep them steady. Darkness smudged in at the edges of her field of vision. She shook her head fiercely and won a few more microts of clear vision. But the only thing she could see was row after row of bloodied bodies, some tossing and turning and moaning, some frighteningly still. A young red-patterned Druinosi lying in her row of beds twitched and cried out in pain, and Jool moved as if to go to him, but she was so weak that Ajna's hand kept her down easily.

"Well, maybe just a few microts." The decision made, Ajna released her shoulder and left. Jool pushed once, twice, and suddenly found that she couldn't quite move out of the squat she'd been in, sorting out a pile of bandages to find an appropriately sized one. She fell forward onto her hands and knees even as another Druinosi came to take over where she'd left off. Out of the corner of her eye she could see him select a bandage and bring it back to the patient Jool had just left.

Almost any other time, Jool would have been hideously embarassed to be caught crawling on her hands and knees, but now she was glad for even that much movement as she set her sights on a corner and slowly, painstakingly made her way there. A microt later she had reached the corner and was oblivious to the activity around her.

~*~

"One."

D'Argo bent deep into a crouch and secured his handholds, flexing experimentally. Oh, this was going to be heavy.

"Two."

Fists clenched tight, muscles primed, eyes trained on the four other crew members lifting the remnant of wall with him.

"Three!"

Five sets of muscles lifted together, and D'Argo let out a bellow as his screamed in protest. Step forward, left foot and right foot and left foot again, one last heave, and the wall was, if not in the same place before, at least leaning securely in the same general area.

Medics swarmed into the exposed opening of the restaurant, and they were met by cries of relief from the people who had been trapped in there for nearly thirty six arns now.

D'Argo shook his hands out, loosening the cramps in his fingers from their tight grip. He scanned each person lifted out on a stretcher, and for a split second thought he'd found her, but it turned out to be just the white breast of a Druinosi stumbling out of the entryway.

Over twenty plazas cleared, and still no sign of Chiana. He had woken up with her name on his lips, deciding that the time to stand back and trust her independence had ended. Now he was well and truly worried for the Nebari girl.

"B Team, we're moving on!" Nemali spread his right wing out to flag down the other crew members and pointed down a newly refortified walkway to yet another plaza filled with debris. D'Argo glanced one last time at the interior of the restaurant, confirming what he already knew, and trudged after the others.

~*~

"Are you praying?" Chiana was fascinated, and paused her work on the communications device to move closer to Varlin.

They had eaten a light meal out of the snacks behind the bar, topped off with the least alcoholic liquor Chiana could find. Varlin hadn't had any idea which that would be, so she had set him to cleaning out the cupboards of anything edible and cataloguing it while she hunted for a bottle of fellip nectar with a low proof count. As much as she would have liked to get well and truly drunk, that was out of the question right now. She still had to find a way to contact the others and let them know she was alive. And it wouldn't do at all to get Varlin uproariously drunk in response to the crises that were coursing through his life right now.

Chiana hadn't the slightest idea where that responsible streak had come from, but it was there.

So now she was, while not exactly full because of rationing, at least not hungry anymore, and she'd begun to make definite progress toward coaxing the comm device to recognize and isolate specific frequencies instead of just compiling all bands into the mishmash of noise that was all it currently wanted to acknowledge existed.

Varlin knelt in the middle of the bar, wings swept out, touching his fingers to the tip of his beak and then his forehead, then the ground in front of him. Once, twice, three times, as he muttered in a lanugage that Chiana could tell was an ancient version of the Druinosi spoken language. He seemed completely oblivious to the fact that she'd addressed him, so she tried again.

"Varlin?" His name seemed to shock him out of the trance, and he started, looking about with wide eyes.

"I'm sorry." Chiana moved the rest of the way around the bar to stand next to him. "I asked if you were praying. I didn't know it would disturb you that much."

"You didn't disturb me," Varlin said, dropping his jaw down in a smile. "I wasn't praying. Well, not exactly."

"Do the Druinosi have gods?" Chiana could name several dozen gods at the drop of a hat. She'd even tried praying to one or two, before Nerri had left. But when he left, so did any desire to rely on anyone else but herself. And that included deities.

"Not as such." Varlin sighed. Obviously the issue was a great deal more complicated than a simple yes or no. "As most people, before we left the bounds of our own planet, we had different religions, different sects vying for power. But once we became a spacefaring people, all that began to seem - trivial. I imagine the confirmation of your own near anonymity as a race will either fortify or destroy most tenets of religion. For us, our religions did not survive the transition to the modern age.

"But that's not to say that we don't believe in anything. Once we had traveled in our own solar system, and developed faster than light travel and established ties with nearby solar systems, a movement began to stay on Druinos. It was in part centered around the kavench trees, you see - our way of life had, for untold millenia, circled around the kavench trees and our cities in the sky. We are a metal-poor planet. All the changes necessary to gear us fully toward space travel would have cost our planet too much. And so, more and more, Druinosi chose to remain on Druinos.

"Now, you will hardly ever see a Druinosi outside of our own planet." Chiana nodded in agreement. She'd never seen one in all her extensive travels. She almost asked what this had to do with religion, but held her tongue and Varlin continued.

"Out of this movement, of staying on Druinos, grew a philosophy, and a sort of religion. I should say, is growing, because it is still very much in its infancy. Scholars at the major universities are beginning to truly examine the old myths and legends, and are beginning to collect a growing body of evidence that suggests things about the Druinosi race that no one had previously suspected.

"I'm sure you've noticed that the Druinosi are an avian-descended species. Answer me this: how do avians know to change direction in flight all together?" Varlin's voice was excited, and it was clear that this was an area of study he had followed extensively.

"Some sort of telepathy?" Chiana guessed, and was rewarded with a wide grin from Varlin.

"Exactly. But at the same time, more - something much deeper than that. An inbred sense of community. An instinctive grounding in empathy - a shared consciousness." Varlin stood up to be face to face with Chiana. "Before - " and here he hesitated, as he once again remembered the destruction of Anlach City " - before this happened, I was part of that study. My advisor was - is - a brilliant man, and we have been working on techniques to unlock these hidden talents." An incredible sadness swept his face once again. "It is my most sincere hope that he still lives. I tried to find him earlier, but both the university and his home building were impassable."

"You came back to take care of me," Chiana realized. "You stopped looking for him to make sure I was all right." She suddenly felt ashamed, however grateful she may have been for his help. "I'm so sorry."

Varlin reached his hand out to her shoulder, compassion in his eyes. "There was nothing I could have done. The work crews will reach those areas with or without my help or input. Helping you, I could make a difference. Professor Kedler will understand that and be glad of it."

~*~

“We need to stop soon.” Crichton sat down heavily on a protruding rock, still cradling the Druinosi child in his arms. Aeryn had offered to take the burden from him, several times, but he had refused each time.

They were now well into midday of the second day on Druinos, and while they were not exposed to direct sunlight because of the tree canopy, the warmth that filtered down to them created an almost unbearably sticky and moist atmosphere. Aeryn judged it just a few degrees short of a temperature she would have to start worrying about - no doubt that was why Crichton had insisted on carrying the child himself. As the day had progressed and the temperature increased, she found her movements slower and slower, and her judgment lessened.

She didn’t have the energy to reply to Crichton’s statement, and only nodded wearily. They would need to find somewhere protected and defensible. Wiping the back of her hand against her forehead to fling moisture droplets away, she hefted her pack once again and continued slow progress through the undergrowth.

Four arns later, it was Crichton who spotted the opening to the cave, even with his inferior eyesight. Aeryn eyed it for a few moments and decided it would do; it wasn’t easily discoverable unless one were looking specifically for the entrance to a cave, and there were several low-hanging vines and shrubs that could be rearranged with a minimum of fuss to cover the entrance adequately.

“It works,” she confirmed out loud, and pushed aside the vines to enter first. Crichton, carrying the child, couldn’t reach his pulse pistol in time if he needed to, so she would precede him and take care of any hidden threats.

Pulse pistol trained ahead in the near-darkness, Aeryn advanced step after careful step, scuffing ahead with her boots to detect any irregularities in the floor or sudden dropoffs. A half dozen metras into the cave, she still hadn’t found anything.

“I think this will work,” she called back. “I don’t know how far back it goes, though.” A microt later, she had decided to follow Crichton’s example, and fired a few shots toward the back of the cave.

The blasts went perhaps another hundred metras before they splashed into a back wall in a shower of sparks. “We should go as far back as we can get. We’ll be less detectable that way.”

Crichton grunted in agreement, and Aeryn continued to scuff and shuffle her way across the floor, occasionally stubbing her toe on an outcropping, but moving inexorably closer to the back of the cave.

Her head found the ceiling before she reached the back, as she walked straight into a stalactite, her forehead bouncing back off the rock. “Frell!” she swore roundly, and reached up delicately with one hand to probe the area.

Her fingers came back wet and sticky - definitely blood, not just the condensed moisture from outside.

“Aeryn, are you okay?” Crichton’s voice was worried, and tense, and she reassured him quickly before he came charging back after her.

“I’m fine. Just hit my head,” she called back, and sidled from left to right to see how wide this part of the cave was. Not very - she guessed that if she stretched her arms out there would only be a few denches of free space past the tips of her fingers.

“I’m as far back as I can get. I’m going to use one of the small lights so you can find your way back.” With that, Aeryn set down her pack and by touch, sorted through the supplies until she’d found one of the smallest light sources, circular and about half the size of her palm. Flicking a switch on its back flooded light through the cavern, and threw Crichton’s profile at the entrance in stark relief.

He began moving back toward her as Aeryn used the light to explore a little further. The floor was covered in dirt and some animal droppings, though small and old enough to lead her to believe that they wouldn’t need to worry about cave denizens returning to bother them. The walls were slick and damp, and occasionally there was a full trickle of water.

Aeryn knew nothing about geology - that was a tech’s job - but her intuition led her to believe that water had carved out at least part of this cave; the walls were smooth to her touch, smoothed down by countless cycles of dripping water. And as she sat there, drops splattered onto her shoulders from the ceiling above.

Which in turn reminded her of the gash on her forehead just as Crichton made his way to the back of the cave with the child in his arms - who was still unconscious, Aeryn noted, and was briefly jealous of the ease with which the Druinosi was able to sleep through the entire ordeal.

“Aeryn, you are not fine,” were, predictably enough, Crichton’s first words. He set the child down and reached out for her. “You’re bleeding.”

Aeryn jerked away from him and stood, narrowly missing the same stalactite once again. “Head wounds bleed more. It isn’t serious.” She moved a few more denches away from him just in case he would try to touch her anyway. She didn’t think she could handle that right now. “I’m going to go find some kindling and cover the entrance more effectively.”

And with that, she left.

~*~

“Pilot, why is it exactly that you didn’t warn us that there were Peacekeepers on their way down to try and kill us?”

Rygel was truly, thoroughly bored. He had exhausted all his usual tactics of keeping his mind occupied - running through the one hundred and forty-four ways he had thought of to execute his cousin Bishan, conjuring up a different mistress for each night of the cycle, and flipping through his mental catalogue of all the courtiers and retainers that he would need to bribe, kill, or speechify in order to sway power in his direction once again - and he had now resorted to annoying others, always an amusing way to pass his time.

“The Marauder entered on a stealth trajectory on the opposite side of the planet from us,” Pilot explained patiently, though Rygel could detect a hint of regret in his voice as well. “It had not detected us, as far as we can tell, or we would have been a very easy target. By the time we became aware of its presence it had already begun its bombardment.”

Pilot’s voice dropped in sorrow. “Moya has been extremely distracted in her grief, and I had powered down all but essential systems while you were on the planet in an attempt to lessen her burden. Running on quarter power, she would have appeared at first glance to be nothing more than an orbital platform. The Marauder was not looking very closely.”

“And why is that?” Rygel asked peevishly, idly spinning his throne sled in slow circles.

“I do not know, Dominar.” Now Pilot’s tone of voice was exasperated. Amazing how many emotions he could convey with that voice, Rygel mused, and flipped the switch to begin spinning in the other direction.

“They had to have known we were here somehow,” Rygel answered, and, for the first time in nearly twelve arns, he found himself intrigued. “Someone told them we were here.”

“A likely theory, Dominar.”

Rygel’s mind was spinning. This - this was something he understood, something he specialized in. Layers of deceit and cunning. Someone had sold them out to the highest bidder, and Rygel considered himself uniquely qualified to discover whom.

~*~

“Jool?”

“Yes, D’Argo. I’m rather busy at the moment, so if you don’t mind - ”

“Have you heard any word about Chiana?”

“No, D’Argo. D’Argo, I’m…sorry. I last saw her with a young Druinosi. She hasn’t been brought in for treatment yet, if that’s any consolation. Knowing her, she’s found somewhere to hole up for the duration, and we won’t see so much as a hint of gray skin until the danger is completely past.”

“Please let me know if you hear anything.”

“I will do that. D’Argo - take care.”

“And you, Jool.”

~*~

Crichton’s small fire was burning merrily before Aeryn remembered the gash on her forehead, now dried and flaking blood. She dipped a corner of cloth onto one of the walls and dabbed at her forehead ineffectually, wincing as the crusted scabs broke off and blood began to flow freely again.

“Here, let me help.” Crichton had been staring at her in what he thought was an unobtrusive manner from across the fire, and now he moved forward onto his knees beside her, holding out his hand for the cloth.

“I can do this myself, Crichton,” she snapped, and dabbed more fiercely, which only caused the blood to flow more freely. The wound began to throb again, and a headache started pulsing in time with her heartbeat.

“Hell you can.” He grabbed at her arm and though his grip didn’t have anywhere near the force it would have needed to keep her still, she suddenly found that moving was out of the question. She could feel every milidench of his fingers, even through the leather of her duster sleeve.

With his other hand, he took the cloth from her and touched it to her forehead, carefully clearing away the blood from the edges of the wound. His movements slowed and a stray finger brushed against her cheekbone, moving something liquid inside her stomach.

She caught herself just before leaning into his touch and jerked back. “That’s fine.”

He ground his teeth, but then seemed to rally for another attempt. “Aeryn, we need to talk.”

“There’s nothing to talk about, Crichton.” She threw the bloodied, ruined cloth into the fire and took a fierce delight in the way the flames licked hungrily at the edges of it.

“Dammit, Aeryn - ”

A low moan from the direction of the Druinosi child diverted both their attention, and Aeryn refused to allow herself the sigh of relief that pushed at her lips.

“Looks like she’s waking up.” Crichton moved back around the fire to sit cross-legged next to the child, whose head moved a fraction of a dench, eyelids fluttering rapidly. He reached forward to touch her cheek.

In the instant that his fingers touched the child, her eyes flew wide open, and Crichton fell to the ground in a slump, unconscious.

“Crichton!” Aeryn leapt forward, pulse pistol in one hand, other hand reaching for his arm. Her fingertips touched the skin of his hand -

\- and she fell into oblivion.

~*~

This time, when Chiana turned on the comm device, a clamor of voices assaulted her ears and she almost jumped back in startlement.

“ - sector five team reports extensive damage among the Tzankas Quarter, and requests additional team members to assist with retrieval and transportation of wounded inhabitants.”

“Yes! Varlin!” He looked across the room from where he had been looking out the doorway, trying to see at least something in the waning light of late afternoon.

Just as he turned, however, he was knocked down across the floor by a swiftly moving object that flew through the door. Chiana ducked behind the counter and threw herself across the floor to retrieve the pulse pistol she had tucked back behind the counter.

She closed her fingers around the butt just as she heard the intruder start to demand of Varlin where the money was.

“I don’t know!” Varlin’s pleading voice answered. He was a scholar, not an athlete, and was probably very easily outmatched by anyone who would think to loot in the ruins of Anlach City.

“Why else are you here, then?” The gruff voice was tinged with no small amount of hysteria, and anger. It seemed the aftermath of the attack was having a more profound and more unsettling effect on other Druinosi than it had had on Varlin. Chiana realized with a sudden terror that there really was no other explanation for Varlin to be here, other than looting. He was uninjured and seemingly alone in an abandoned bar. The intruder would scoff at the truth and would kill Varlin if Chiana didn’t act soon.

Varlin didn’t have an answer to the intruder’s question, and his only noise was a choked gurgle as the Druinosi did something that cut off his breath. “I think you’re lying. Tell me where the money is, you stunted ground-crawler, or I will simply kill you and take it myself. Save me the time of looking, and I will let you live.”

“Hey, fekkik!” Chiana chose that moment to spring to her feet, and allowing herself a quick good luck prayer to her nonexistent gods, fired repeatedly into the Druinosi who had turned in surprise to evaluate this new possible threat.

Her shots took him right in the head, and his skull exploded in gore and bits of feathers. Red fuzz was everywhere for a moment, and Chiana edged out around the bar, still keeping her pulse pistol trained on the body. It wouldn’t have been the first time someone she’d been sure was dead recovered from a “mortal” wound to surprise her in a rather unpleasant way.

But this Druinosi seemed well and truly dead, his body slack where it pinned Varlin’s to the floor. If Chiana had had more than the bar snacks in her stomach she might have been tempted to empty it at the sight of the gore patterned against the wood resin floor of the bar. Druinosi bones were thin and hollow to allow for flight, and that meant that his skull had not put up much resistance to her pulse shot at all.

“Chiana?” Varlin’s terrified voice reached her ears, and she cast the pulse pistol aside to run to him. “Get him off me.”

She ignored the gore and shoved at the body, rolling it over so that it was no longer on top of Varlin. “Are you all right?” Her voice sounded far away to her ears, and to her shock and mild embarrassment, she was shaking in reaction to the fright that had by now passed her by.

“I think so.” His voice was shaking, and he reached a hand up to wipe off his face. “That was far too close.”

She nodded wordlessly and sat down next to him, sharing a companionable survivor’s silence for a few microts, eyes shut tightly.

~*~

Aeryn fell hard onto her hands and knees, the momentum sending her skidding for a few denches across the dew-soaked meadow.

The what?

Warily, she looked around and found that her initial sensory impression of wherever the hezmana she was had been correct. She was in a meadow in early morning, faint streams of sunlight coming through the trees. The grass was slicked with dew, and here and there a lazily flying pollinator nuzzled at a blossom heavy with pollen.

“What the frell?” she said aloud, feeling the sudden need to vocalize her thoughts. The background buzzing of the pollinator and the gurgle of an unseen stream were not her idea of comfortable background noise. Engine rhythms and display beepings were.

Keeping herself below the surface line of the tall grass, she reached one cautious hand down to her hip, where her holster was empty. A cursory search of the surrounding area told her that it hadn’t merely been jarred from her body by the landing - it was nowhere to be seen.

She hissed a curse under her breath and patted the ground around her in search of something, anything that could be used as a weapon. At this point she would settle for a heavy stick, or even a small one she could sharpen to an effective point.

There was a rustling in the grass a few metras away from her, and she flattened herself against the ground, listening to track where it was coming from. Whatever was rustling, it was large - easily her size, and possibly larger. She flexed her fingers and tried to shift silently so that she had a chance of taking down whoever it was and demanding some answers as to why one minute she could be in a cave on Druinos and the next lying in a meadow on some entirely different world.  
The rustling moved closer, and she made her decision. Coiling her body as best she could while still staying below the waist-high grass line, she sprung, ramming her shoulder hard into the chest of whoever - or whatever - had been approaching her, knocking it to the ground and immediately straddling, thumb poised to crush its larynx.

“Aeryn!” Crichton wheezed, looking up at her with wide blue eyes. Her own eyes widened in surprise, and she almost rolled off to let him up before she remembered just how bizarre her situation was.

“Are you really John Crichton?” she asked in a low, dangerous voice, unsettled by the shift in her reality, and ready to be completely unnerved by the illusion of the man she had loved. None of this made sense, and if whoever was playing this game with her had chosen to frell with her mind by using Crichton, her puppeteer had another guess coming.

“You tell me, Aeryn, you’re the one that thinks I’m the copy.” There was a bitter anger in his voice, and a depthless pain in his eyes, and the pain rebounded to Aeryn, cracking the wall she’d built around herself.

“I - ” There was nothing to say, so she rolled off him to kneel in the grass beside his prone body. He scrambled to a sitting position quickly, and almost stood up before she grabbed his shoulder with a firm hand, keeping him down.

“They’ll see you,” she hissed, keeping a solid grip on his shoulder and trying not to disturb the grass too obviously.

“Who’s ‘they’, Aeryn?” he asked in a weary voice. “We’re in the middle of nowhere. Wherever nowhere is,” he added, with a strained smile that did nothing to ease the tension.

“Better question: how did we get here?” Aeryn kept her voice low, and her eyes trained on the movement of the tall grass around them, senses alert for the slightest change.

“I was sitting next to the child. She had just started to wake up and I touched her cheek and then next thing I knew I was here.” He paused and then continued, his voice low and taut. “It looks like Earth.”

She tilted her head, taking her eyes away from their guard for just a moment to rest them on his face. She didn’t have to say just how improbable it was that they had been transported halfway across the galaxy to his home planet just by touching an injured Druinosi child. He knew that.

Her hand on his shoulder loosened and was almost gentle for a brief moment. He took advantage of that moment and shot to his feet, taking off in a sprint across the field.

~*~

“Pilot, what can you find out about the Marauder that attacked the city?” Rygel had, since his first conversation, left the transport pod to very cautiously hunt through the offices of the airfield. That search had netted him a handful of odd-shaped fruit and a few of the dried food cubes that Crichton had called “crackers.” Rygel had looked at them for a moment and had only grudgingly slid them into a pocket of his robe - he would forever remember that taste in association with D’Argo’s hands at his throat.

He’d eaten one of the fruits but stored the others in hiding places on the transport pod, his natural greed warring with the more logical fact that he had no idea where he was going to find more food and when he was going to be able to leave this frelling planet. Right now his third stomach was rumbling obnoxiously, and he could tell that his second stomach would chime in soon.

He had considered the situation from several angles, and there were three possibilities as far as he could see. The first was that the Marauder had somehow escaped from Scorpius’s doomed command carrier and had somehow been able to track them to Druinos. Or, concurrently, that the Peacekeepers had been able to arrive soon enough after the destruction of the carrier to launch an immediate retrieval squad. This was, in Rygel’s mind, the most likely, especially given the way they had announced themselves - commandoes bent on avenging the death of the carrier would first and foremost be looking for Crichton.

The second was that pure happenstance had placed this particular Marauder crew in their paths, and the outstanding warrants for arrest for the entire group had been on record and part of their secondary mission. If that were so, Rygel would be a great deal more interested in what their primary mission had been; that was information that could be used in leverage. He found it highly unlikely that even the snidely efficient Peacekeepers had been able to react to the carrier’s destruction so quickly and so decisively - a blow of that magnitude, he knew, would require some high level politicking to deal with properly. This was evidence in weight of the second possibility.

Third was something Rygel included in every set of calculations he had made since his forced abdication - randomness. As a Dominar, he had excelled at projecting possibilities and gambling on likelihoods. But he had been arrogant - he had assumed that the universe would only arrange itself into the patterns he had forseen. He had forgotten about chaos, and he had lost his throne because of it. Bishan had been nowhere in his field of vision. Rygel had spent over a hundred cycles placing a new value on the place of randomness in any given plan. His association with the human had only reinforced that faith.

And so, before he went any further in his plotting, he needed more information.

“As I already mentioned, the Marauder entered the atmosphere on a stealth trajectory on the opposite side of the planet from where Moya is resting in stationary orbit. Because she was in hibernation, I only have available to me the information that was recorded as part of the standard passive sensor readings.”

“And what kind of information would that be, Pilot?” Rygel tried to hold back his impatience. In the back of his mind he was already considering why the Marauder had entered on a stealth trajectory, why it had not attacked Moya, and - perhaps the most important question - how it had known that the fugitives were stopping on this planet.

“Normally, speed, trajectory, energy signature, and registry identification. None of that information is now available because of the stealth approach.”

“What information is available?”

“Anything gathered after the Marauder revealed itself and began firing on Anlach City.”

Rygel waited a few beats, and then rolled his eyes and asked. “And what information would that be?”

“The sum of all munitions used to fire on the city, a monitoring of public comms traffic coming from the ship, and any sensor information that can be gathered about a Marauder in standby mode. Not much.”

“The Marauder is in standby?” Now that was interesting information. The commandos hadn’t left anyone with the ship.

“Standby and lockdown. Minimal power, only enough to activate the weapons system when anyone is detected to within a certain radius of the ship.”

Very interesting. They weren’t planning on returning for some time - Rygel knew only patchwork pieces of information about Peacekeeper commandos, but one of the things he knew was that lockdown was a long term situation.

Which meant that there were five elite commandos somewhere, following Crichton.

He wished the fahrbot human luck and began a mental inventory of Crichton’s possessions.

~*~

“What happened to him?” Jool blurted out, staring in horror at the ravaged body that had been placed before her. It seemed that someone had noticed that she had enough medical experience to handle slightly more difficult injuries than she had been dealing with, and for the past arn she had seen more heavy trauma cases than she had ever thought she wanted to.

The tall, thickly muscled Druinosi who had dropped the Xenetan in front of her rolled his shoulder and gathered his wings in tight to his body, something Jool had learned meant indifference and no small amount of irritation.

“She tried to break into the Marauder. Scavenging, most likely. It’s all the Xenetans know how to do.” With that, he rustled his jet-black feathers and whirled on his heels to leave her alone with the unconscious victim.

Jool stared at the body helplessly for a few microts, and then her hands seemed to begin of their own volition. Massive burns, of a type she hadn’t seen today. Most of the other burns had been from exposure to direct flame.

These burns were from pulse fire, the first she had seen today. Anyone caught in the initial barrage had either not survived or not been well enough to move from their place.

Injuries in the right thigh, stomach, upper left chest, most of a right arm missing, and a great deal of blood around the face but no apparent head injury.

There was almost no way he - she, Jool reminded herself - was going to live. Massive internal hemorrhaging and severe burns over more than half of the surface area gave the Xenetan a life expectancy in the single digit arns. If that.

“What made you think you could steal a Marauder?” she snapped at the patient even as she did her best to control the bleeding and make her comfortable.

“Lockdown,” the Xenetan slurred, blood trickling out from a corner of her mouth and tracking down to be lost in the dark tattoo covering the left half of her face.

“What?” Shocked, Jool almost dropped the bandage she had been in the process of applying over the thigh wound. There was no way the Xenetan was conscious. Hastily, she scrambled for a painkiller. She didn’t know much about Xenetan physiology, but it was entirely possible that their species did not react to trauma in the expected manner.

“Was’n lockdown,” the woman answered, her thick features grimacing in pain.

“The Marauder was in lockdown?” A microt later, Jool cursed herself for a fool for asking such an obvious question.

“Been following,” the woman continued, and punctuated that statement with a wet choking laugh that turned into a coughing fit and mixed more blood down the inked face.

“You followed a Marauder?” Jool’s voice showed her horror at the Xenetan’s stupidity. “You thought you could steal it when it landed. You didn’t count on them engaging lockdown. Marauders almost never do. But then, they usually leave a team member with the ship when they’re on planetary operations.” The next part of the plan struck her with its audacity. “You were going to overpower a Peacekeeper special commando to scavenge a Marauder?”

“Heh.” The woman chuckled again, and Jool could feel the movement reverberate through her stomach, where she was currently working to staunch the blood flow from the gaping would there. “Unch’ted Terr’tries.”

“Separated from Peacekeeper High Command by several monens. I assume they’d been in the field for a while, as well.” Jool’s mind was already racing along the possibilities. It was fahrbot, the Xenetan’s plan, but then so were most of Crichton’s. Jool had more than her share of experience in following the fallacies of fahrbot plans. Something new occurred to her. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Partners?” More blood down her cheek, but the look in her dark eyes was one of canny hope. Jool’s mouth fell agape, and she tied off the new tourniquet on the woman’s arm in a daze. She was entirely unsure what to answer.

She didn’t have to answer. The Xenetan’s eyes turned from calculation to a flat void as she exhaled once more and died.

~*~

D’Argo heaved the body from his shoulders and very consciously refused to look at it where it lay, limbs askew. It was a Delvian female, that much he’d been able to tell by what remained of the torso when he first found it, but beyond that there was no chance of any sort of identification except by genetics. Still, the familiar blue tones reminded him far too much of Zhaan for his comfort. He’d nearly become immune to the death surrounding the attack, but the Delvian body had come entirely too close to a more personal loss.

He refused to contemplate what other losses he might have to face before they were finally able to leave this frelling planet.

“D’Argo?” His comm badge squawked from where he’d tucked it into a belt pouch to stay out of the way of the lifting he’d been doing.

His hands fumbled at the pouch even as his brain registered that the feminine voice calling his name wasn’t Jool, and it wasn’t Aeryn - he nearly dropped the comm badge even as he moved quickly out of the path of traffic of rescue workers bringing bodies from the rubble to the ragtag medical team.

“D’Argo?” The voice sounded again, louder but more hesitant. “Are you there?”

“Chiana!” he nearly bellowed into the comm badge when he finally grasped it tightly with fingers that were practically shaking in relief.

“No need to yell, D’Argo. I’m here. Where are you?” The sly teasing that was so typically Chiana was strongly in evidence, but he knew her well enough to detect the strong undercurrent of relief in her voice.

“Working with a salvage crew in the Petroyev District. That’s - several metras from where we left the transport pod. Where are you?” Workers carried the body of a young child past him, and he forced his eyes away to focus on the comm badge. Chiana was all right. She was _all right._

“A bar, somewhere. Near the edge of the city.” A mumbled voice sounded from the distance on her end of the comm, and he heard the muffled scratch as she covered the comm with her hand to block the noise. “Varlin says we’re in the Renkari District. I don’t know if that helps or not.”

“Who’s Varlin?” He couldn’t help it; suspicion leapt immediately into his voice.

“A friend, D’Argo. He’s been helping me. All the walkways to the bar are ash and I’m stuck here. So just - drop it, okay?” Her tone was angrily defensive, and deep inside, he acknowledged it as justified. He just couldn’t help it.

“Fine. Are you sure you’re okay there?” He watched the rescue crews transport another body to the medics, a Druinosi child, and heard the grunts and yells of the rescue team as they shifted another piece of wreckage aside.

“Yes, I’m sure. I mean, I’d like to get the frell out of here, but there’s nothing pressing.” She paused briefly and he sensed that she didn’t particularly want to ask the next question but needed to anyway. “Have you heard from the others?”

He hesitated briefly but responded before she could worry. “Yes. Rygel is with the transport pod and Jool is helping with the medical teams.”

“And Crichton and Aeryn?” Her voice was impatient and tinged with worry, and he knew that he had rather unfairly evaded the question she really wanted answered by telling her about Rygel and Jool first.

“Crichton had the fahrbot idea to descend to the surface and try to draw the commandos away from the city.” He hadn’t been aware of just how bitter he was about his friend’s foolish decision until just now, and the wave of frustration that swept through him surprised him. Fahrbot was too mild a word for the risk Crichton had put himself in. Then again, D’Argo reasoned, he ought to be used to it by now. They had, after all, just destroyed a command carrier as part of one of Crichton’s plans.

“And Aeryn went with him.” It wasn’t a question; of course Aeryn had gone with him.

D’Argo answered it anyway, perhaps just to have something to say. “Yes.”

There was an awkward silence for a few microts, and D’Argo cursed the ineffectiveness of the comm systems to convey emotions properly. He had no idea how Chiana was taken the news that her adopted older brother had embarked on yet another insane quest.

“Listen, how soon can you get to me?“ It seemed she was taking the practical route. She didn’t bother asking if there was any way to contact Crichton; either she knew instinctively that he would have made that possible, or she knew equally instinctively that opening a comm channel to his location would bring the Peacekeepers right down on him. Either way, there was nothing to do but wait.

“I don’t know. I don’t even know where I am in relation to you.” He glanced around and grabbed the shoulder of one of the rescue workers passing him.

“You - how far is the Renkari District from here?”

The Druinosi regarded him tiredly. “It’s on the edges of the city.” He waved one thin arm in a vague direction to the right. “That way. We’re near the center.”

“Will it be reached soon?” D’Argo kept his grip on the man’s shoulder, but made sure it was as gentle as possible. He had the feeling that if he used any more pressure the worker might well fall over.

“I don’t know. Depends on how badly that section of the city was damaged,” the man replied dully. “Could be days. Could be arns. Anyway, it won’t be by us. We’re going that way.” His arms swung in a direction roughly ninety degrees to where he had gestured before. “If you don’t mind, I have work to get to.”

“Thank you for your help.” D’Argo squeezed the man’s shoulder gently in a show of support and received a faint smile of thanks in return as the man continued back to the front of the rescue efforts.

He returned to the comm. “Chiana, I don’t now how soon I can get to you. Apparently you’re a ways away and not in our path.”

“I’m fine here, D’Argo. Varlin can go get food if we need it.” The voice in the distance spoke again. “He says to tell you he’ll take care of me.”

D’Argo refrained from speculating on just how Varlin would take care of her, angry with himself for that level of jealousy. The Druinosi had obviously done well so far, and for that he deserved the Luxan’s gratitude, not his bitterness. “Thank him for me. I should get back to helping, but I’ll let you know if anything happens.” He deliberately left the meaning of anything wide open, but Chiana saw right through it.

“He’ll be okay. He’s Crichton. Goodbye, D’Argo.”

“Goodbye, Chiana.”

D’Argo stood for a moment and then tapped the comm, sliding it back to his belt pocket. He flexed his tired muscles and strode toward the group of rescue workers trying to lift a charred beam that had once supported an awning to an outdoor restaurant.

_He’ll be okay. He’s Crichton._ He just wished he had Chiana’s faith in the human.

~*~

He didn’t get more than a few paces before Aeryn caught up to him and tackled him, knocking him back down into the tall grass, this time keeping her grip tight.

“What the frell do you think you’re doing?” she hissed, furious at him.

“There were pine trees over there, Aeryn, lemme _go_ \- ” He squirmed under her grip, his voice almost feverish. It was the same tone he’d used to talk to himself about wormholes, when Aeryn listened outside his quarters late at night.

“Absolutely not,” she snapped back. “I don’t care what you think you saw, we could be in hostile territory. Neither of us is going to do anything so stupid as to run across an open area.”

“Not everywhere is hostile territory, Officer Sun.” He was well and truly angry with her now, and she almost preferred that to the pain.

“How did we get here?” she demanded in return.

He couldn’t answer, and he knew he had been caught. He looked away from her face, his cheek resting in the dirt, and his body relaxed under hers. Sensing that his brain had finally caught up to his impulses, Aeryn rolled off him once again. She sat next to him, arms tucked around her drawn-up knees.

“My pulse pistol is gone,” she began by way of conversation.

“Winona too.”

She refrained from saying, _at least you checked_, and looked up at the sky. For all intents and purposes, a beautiful day. The sky was clear and blue, with only wisps of white clouds ambling their way across.

“How do you think we got here?” he asked her, and she knew that if Crichton didn’t have an answer, or at least a theory, they were well and truly in trouble.

“I have no idea,” she answered truthfully, and imagined that one of the clouds looked like a Prowler arrow-six formation.

“The last thing I remember, I was touching the child’s cheek,” he restated, and she knew this rhythm. His human mind was at work. He would begin listing the causes and consequences, actions and reactions, and turn it all over in that brilliant mind of his and come up with an impossible, foolish plan that would somehow work. There was a comfort in that, even if it too closely resembled any number of late-night discussions on Talyn.

“You fell. I came over to see what had happened. I touched your hand, and I felt like I was falling. I fell here, onto the grass.”

“You didn’t touch the child?”

She shook her head, emphatically, no. “I touched your hand with one of mine, and I was holding my pulse pistol in my other hand.”

“Were you going to shoot the kid?” His voice was incredulous, and she knew well the look that accompanied it, but she chose to keep her eyes on the Prowler formation in the sky even as the two craft in the left wing of the arrow broke off and dissolved.

“It was an instinct, Crichton,” she replied, even though she suddenly found that she no longer wanted the type of instincts that sent her to a sick child’s bedside with pulse pistol in hand.

He was silent for a moment, and then began speaking again. She should have been annoyed, but this was the most he’d spoken at one time since they picked up his module amongst the debris of the command carrier, and she found it oddly comforting.

“I was touching the child’s cheek. I felt the same sensation you did, falling. I landed - not too far from where you did, obviously, because I was just starting to get up when I heard you land, too. I came towards you to see what the noise had been.”

_Stupid, human,_ her mind commented. Thrown into an unknown place and without a weapon, and his first instinct was to go toward a strange noise. There was an Earth saying about curiosity; he’d explained it to her once. She no longer remembered the specifics, but she remembered that someone had ended up dead. It seemed it was a species trait.

“I came here the exact instant I touched the child’s cheek. I barely even remember feeling her cheek. And then you came here the exact instant you touched my hand?”

“About that, yes.” The last of the Prowlers disintegrated, victim to errant gusts of wind in the atmosphere. But on their flank a squadron of heavyweight bombers began to coalesce in C formation.

“It has something to do with the child. And with touching the child.”

Aeryn could have told him that at the beginning of his monologue, but he seemed pleased to have arrived at the conclusion by logical deduction. The bomber formation heeled left, hard, and she found herself idly computing the angle of trajectory and thrust/fuel ratio it would have taken to judge that turn correctly.

“Do the Druinosi have any known teleportation traits?” he asked suddenly.

“Do they have what?” She almost didn’t have the energy to question his use of the bizarre term.

“Teleportation…um…the ability transport something somewhere else, instantly, by using your mind.”

“You’re fahrbot, human.” She tore her gaze from the clouds to look down at him briefly, to make sure he was serious. He was.

“I’m going to take that as a no.” He laid his cheek back down on the ground, and she went back to watching the bomber formation.

“I suppose anything is possible, but we’re in the Uncharted Territories, remember? The Peacekeepers have no jurisdiction here, and if they keep records of the species that do live here, they don’t make them available to Prowler pilots.” Her calculations told her that that angle of turn resulted in an inexcusable waste of fuel. The flight leader would have been better to take a wider angle of approach and reserve enough fuel to return to the command carrier. Tanks on bombers carried almost exactly enough to return to the carrier. There was a good chance everyone in that formation would die.

_That’s twelve bombers, pilot, co-pilot, three man gun crew. Sixty soldiers, gone._ A command carrier’s typical complement was one hundred and fifty bombers. _Seven hundred and fifty soldiers, gone, because of us, because of me…_

“Let’s go,” she said abruptly, loosening her arms from their encirclement of her legs and then rolling down to rest on her hands and knees. “We’ll make for the edge of the clearing. More cover there.”

She was fairly sure she’d interrupted Crichton speaking, but right now she didn’t really care. He looked at her curiously, but she had already started moving forward, slowly and carefully, staying beneath the grass in the same direction he had been running a moment ago.

She didn’t stop to see if he’d followed her - no point in that; she was quite sure he would - and hoped to have followed the correct path. Her assumption had been that when he stood to run towards his ‘pine trees’ he had taken the shortest path possible.

Her assumption proved right a few minutes later when the grass stopped abruptly and she found herself faced with shadowed forest. She hesitated a moment, and then shoved herself upward and forward, ducking behind one of the trees, the rough bark digging into her back. Crichton joined her a microt later, and compared to the massive girth of the kavench trees they had left behind, this trunk offered scant cover from anyone who might choose to target them.

She rested her head back against the tree for a moment and then turned to Crichton. She opened her mouth to speak -

and he disappeared. She barely had time to react before she, too, was plunged into darkness.

~*~

Sergeant Nemik landed lightly, his hand resting on the line attached to his harness, ready to tug and signal a pull-back in a microt if he needed it. His suit light pierced the darkness, and when he inhaled deeply, the crisp stink of an alien world invaded his nostrils. Resting perfectly still, he hefted himself up on the rope and spun around lazily, sweeping the area. Nothing.

His feet touched the ground again and he unlatched the line with one hand and drew his pulse pistol with the other, tugging twice sharply and then stepping back a few paces to use the kavench tree as cover for his back.

Soon enough, the line was drawn back up and Nemik was left alone at the base of the tree. Not for long, though; within a few microts there was a hum as another commando descended. This time, the uniformed figure didn’t check the ground, simply unlatched the line, tugged it twice, and moved to Nemik’s side.

“Ground secure, Officer,” he told her, and Officer Yata Colven nodded curtly, taking up a guard position at his left. Soon enough she was followed by a third, a fourth, and finally a fifth commando, all carefully taking shelter by the base of the kavench tree. The fifth didn’t tug on the rope, but compressed a button on the hook that was attached to his harness.

Somewhere far above them, tines retracted from where they had been entrenched in the flesh of the tree, and the line fell, dropping to the ground at the feet of the last man with a thunk and rustle. The commando detached the line from his harness and let it fall; Poller, the lowest-ranking member of the team, moved forward and coiled the line in swift, efficient movements and securing it back in its place in his pack.

“Colven, position.”

Officer Colven had been coaxing her tracker to display their position since the third commando, Poller, had dropped and taken her position in guard. She adjusted the controls, her lip caught between her teeth, and appeared not to have heard the Senior Officer’s order.

“Officer Colven.” It wasn’t a shout; the Senior Officer never shouted. But it was a low, deadly tone, one which any of his team members would swear was worse than a shout.

“I’m sorry, sir. The vegetation is proving to inhibit the uplink with the Marauder. I’m not getting a signal. But we are in the exact same spot they began at approximately twelve arns ago. I checked before we descended.”

She could barely see the Senior Officer in the dim glow from their less-powerful suit lights, but she knew the expression on his face well, just as she knew what his decision would be.

“We camp here until first light, and then we track them manually. Nemik, Poller, first watch. Rantor, Colven, second. Three arns each. That should get us to sunrise.”

Colven spread her bedroll with practiced ease, parallel to Rantor’s, and tucked the rest of her pack up underneath her head, setting her internal chronometer to three arns. It wouldn’t do to wake up late; the Senior Officer would know. He hardly ever slept.

And if there was one thing Senior Officer Macton Tal hated above all else, it was to be kept waiting.

~*~

Jool washed the last of the blood off her hands and managed to make it to the bench across the room before collapsing into a slump. She was beyond exhausted, hungry, heartsick and more grimey than she had ever felt in her life. But she was, strangely, elated. She’d spent the past two days helping people; taking a proactive stance and making a difference. It was a situation very different than one she’d really ever found herself in before, and she was amazed to find that she loved it.

But the moment she relaxed, the worries seemed to crowd in. Crichton and Aeryn were on the surface of this strange planet, being hunted by a team of special commandos. Their only way of leaving the planet was being guarded by a Hynerian slug who she had no doubts would betray them in a heartbeat if he found it to his advantage.

At least they had located Chiana. There was some small comfort in that. Though, to be honest, she was trapped in some no doubt rundown section of the city, and no one seemed to know when rescue crews would get to her. Yet another delay in their eventual departure.

The high-pitched whine of starship engines momentarily overpowered every other sound in the vicinity, and everyone paused to look up, their stances fearful. They were a people who had just survived a full assault by a race vastly more technologically advanced than theirs; Jool had no doubt that it would take a full generation to ease the terror.

“Rygel - ” she said, tapping her comm. The transport pod had access to Moya’s sensors, and she needed to know whether someone had been desperate enough to risk the chance of being shot out of the sky to leave the planet, or whether this new craft was something they needed to worry about.

His answer was immediate and confirmed what she already knew in her gut.

“It’s another Marauder.”

~*~

“Dominar, Moya is reading another Marauder approaching Druinos.” Pilot’s voice interrupted Rygel’s attempt to analyze the munitions used to bombard Anlach City versus the average munitions store of a Marauder. It never hurt to know how much firepower your enemy had left, even if you didn’t know anything else about your enemy.

“Another Marauder?” This - was unexpected, to say the least. Randomness, he reminded himself, and toggled the transport pod display screen to show a readout from Moya’s sensors. “Not approaching on a stealth trajectory.”

“No - nor making any attempt to hail the ships in orbit, or employ anything other than passive scans of the surrounding area.”

“They know where they’re going,” Rygel mused. “They were in contact with the other Marauder.”

“It would seem so.”

“But why send another Marauder?” His question was entirely rhetorical, and Pilot seemed to recognize that, because he stayed silent.

This second Marauder seemed to be relying on sensor information from the first, which might well be part of the reason it hadn’t attacked Moya. But why was it coming here? One commando team was generally considered more than adequate to take care of a situation.

They could be the vanguard of a larger force…or one of the two Marauders could be rogue. Falling back on the unlikely possibility of a fast Peacekeeper response to the destruction of the command carrier, it seemed they had a rogue team of commandos on their hands.

“Entering the atmosphere…now.”

The question was, then, which team was rogue?”

~*~

“Varlin, I want you to go find your university and see if your professor is all right.”

Chiana’s voice interrupted the silence that had reigned since her conversation with D’Argo. Varlin had been sitting in the open doorway, legs sprawled over the side, peering into the waning evening light, and Chiana had finished taking stock of their supplies for the third time in an arn. If there had ever been a time where she’d been more bored, she couldn’t remember it. Which was probably for the better.

“I told your friend I’d take care of you,” he refuted stubbornly, which was more or less exactly what she’d thought he would say.

“What D’Argo doesn’t realize is that I can take care of myself.” Chiana moved out from behind the bar and stood behind Varlin. “Pretend it’s a supply run. We can’t drink from the bar forever, and there’s not much food left.”

“It’s getting dark.”

“There’s still at least an arn of good light left.”

She was right, and he knew it, but his need to find his mentor was warring with the same honorable nature that had brought him back to make sure she was all right after the initial attack. He was reminding her yet again of Crichton. “Go.” She tapped the pulse pistol that hung at her side in its makeshift holder, in a gesture calculated to remind him just how effectively she had dealt with the last threat to their safety.

He stood and looked at her searchingly, his demeanor indecisive and conflicted, and then he turned back to the door. “I’ll be back in an arn.” Spreading his wings, he used his powerful leg muscles to launch, dropping a few metras before pushing down powerfully and bringing himself level again. A few more sweeps of his wings and he was out of sight.

Chiana watched himself leave, wistfully wondering what it was like to fly like that, before turning back again to contemplate the meager and all-too-familiar furnishings of the dingy bar.

~*~

Aeryn emerged from the momentary darkness to feel someone holding her upper arm tightly, and she rolled, hard, trying to dislodge her assailant’s grip.

When she felt the hand loosen she tugged upward and moved to stand quickly. What she didn’t account for, however, was the ceiling of wherever it was she had emerged. The crown of her head slammed into something solid and her vision was clouded by a very impressive array of sparks. She struggled hard not to throw up and scuffled backward, hands held out in an awkward guard until she could regain effective sight.

“It’s okay, Aeryn, we’re back in the cave.” Her vision slowly coalesced and adjusted to the darkness of the cave, and she could see Crichton crouching by the child’s body, watching her carefully.

She sighed in exasperation and lifted a cautious hand up to her scalp. It wasn’t bleeding, but the spot where she’d hit it was extremely tender and would no doubt swell painfully. She blinked her eyes a few times and cleared away the last of the blurriness - good. No lasting damage.

“Why are we back here?” she asked, sitting down and becoming aware of the pulse pistol gripped in her right hand - exactly where it had been when they’d fallen into the meadow.

“She fell asleep again,” Crichton replied, gesturing to the child. Her eyes were closed and her chest was rising and falling normally. “I don’t think it works unless she’s conscious.”

“You don’t think what works?” Swallowing hard to chase away the last of the nausea, Aeryn leaned over to poke life into the embers of the fire. Apparently they had been away for at least as long as it had felt like.

“I don’t think it was teleportation at all. I think it was…well, a shared telepathy, for lack of a better word.”

Aeryn arranged a soft pile of dry kindling and blew on the embers. The wood shavings began to smoke readily. Another gentle breath and a tiny flame appeared. She knew he would explain if she waited. He always did.

“It wasn’t real - the meadow, the woods, any of it. It was all in our minds. Our bodies were back here. She must have taken memories of Earth from my mind - I was the first one to touch her - and created a place for our minds to go. And we were gone the same amount of time we were in the dreamworld; about a quarter of an arn. The fire went out.” He looked down at the child wonderingly. “What an incredible talent.”

Aeryn fed progressively larger sticks to the fire and coaxed a more lively flame out of the kindling. “It’s dangerous. What if the Peacekeepers had come across us? They could have killed us and we had no way to protect ourselves.” Another stick, snapped in half with a dry popping sound, tucked into the embers to shore up the side of her tiny structure. “And I wasn’t touching her.”

“No, but you were touching me. That must be why it took longer for you to arrive - it had to transmit through me.” He seemed to consider for a moment. “It probably doesn’t work unless it’s bare skin contact.”

The fire was as stable as she could make it; Aeryn leaned back against the wall of the cave. “How does this help us?”

Crichton seemed stymied for a moment. He looked back down at the child when she rustled slightly, and her eyes opened for a second time. “I’m not sure. Let me try something.” He reached down to touch the child’s cheek again before Aeryn could say anything, and slumped over in exactly the same way he had the first time.

~*~

The Druinosi in D’Argo’s work crew all winced simultaneously when the whine of starship engines surrounded them, recognizing on an instinctive level that the tenor was the same as the Marauder that had reduced their city to slag.

D’Argo was already reaching for his comm badge when Rygel’s voice spoke his name. The Luxan drew back into a small alcove, stepping apart from the other Druinosi. If Rygel was about to tell him it really was a Marauder, there was no reason for the Druinosi to hear that right away and begin to panic again.

“I’m here, Rygel.” The work crew stood, wings slack, faces tilted toward the sky, tension and fear radiating from their bodies, and though the engine hum had been only momentary, there was a still silence in the air as everyone waited for the worst to happen.

“It’s another Marauder.” Rygel’s words confirmed it, and D’Argo squeezed his eyes shut. They’d brought so much destruction to this world already, and it seemed the Peacekeepers were not finished yet.

“How much time do we have?” he said quietly, careful not to let any of the Druinosi hear.

“Did I say it was preparing to attack?” The tone was so typically Rygel, haughty and aggrieved. “None of its weapons systems are online. Its trajectory will bring it to land next to the other Marauder.”

“There’s something very wrong here.” One Marauder came in on a stealth trajectory and then opened fire; the other Marauder came in over a day later on an open course but without weapons. It didn’t make sense.

“Very good, Luxan.” Had D’Argo’s mind not been so busy turning over possibilities, he would have taken objection to the patronizing tone. “I believe one of the Marauders is acting…outside of Peacekeeper supervision.”

The moment stretched itself out in time, and D’Argo held his breath, trying to factor in this new possibility. “Which one?”

“There is no way of knowing. You need to go to the landing site and see for yourself.” Rygel’s tone suggested that this was the eminently logical solution, and that he expected his suggestion to be carried out.

“I’m working with the recovery teams,” D’Argo answered, casting a glance at the Druinosi who had by now slowly picked up work again, their nervousness betrayed by occasional furtive glances over their shoulders and ruffling of wings.

“Jool would be useless for something like this. Chiana is trapped. I…” - and he hesitated for a moment - “am not the best asset for the situation.”

D’Argo snorted, but a part of him twinged. Usually they took Rygel’s unwillingness to participate in the more physical aspects of their unfortunate situations as sheer cowardice, but all too often they overlooked the simple undeniable fact of his limited mobility. Rygel would be useless for a reconnaissance mission of this type.

As for Jool - well, Rygel’s assessment was unfortunate but correct.

“And you are within two hundred metras of their projected landing site. I suggest you make your excuses and find out if we have more enemies or someone whose presence we can ignore.” He didn’t say allies. They both understood that anyone under a Peacekeeper banner would never fall into that category for them.

D’Argo looked at the work team one last time and sighed. “I’ll need directional bearings.”

~*~

“Did you find him?”

Varlin hadn’t yet folded his wings or set down the net bag he carried before Chiana leapt from the bar stool toward him.

“No.” Varlin crossed the bar to set down the net bag. “But - I didn’t find his body, either.”

Something about the way he said that made Chiana think he’d found other bodies, and grief struck her anew. Their fault. All those bodies, their fault.

Varlin watched her out of the corner of his eye, and she knew suddenly that he understood what she was thinking; he understood her guilt, and he was sorry for her pain, but at the same time he couldn’t deny her guilt. If they had never landed on Druinos, Anlach City would have continued on as always in the normal rhythms of its life.

Chiana shifted her weight back to the balls of her feet and moved forward to take a seat beside Varlin, resting a hand on his arm in an unspoken accord. “What’s in the bag?”

Varlin blinked an inner set of eyelids, quickly, as if coming out of a deep inner contemplation. “Ah - food. Supplies. Another blanket.”

He emptied the bag of its contents in a careful, precise manner, setting items along the bar one by one until the net was slack again. He folded the net and set it at the end of the row of supplies with a deliberate care that made Chiana squirm in her seat, but she sensed that rushing him wouldn’t get her anywhere.

Varlin waved his hand, encompassing the farthest items. “Food - tessek bread and dried fruit, mostly. No meat, I’m afraid; Druinosi are not meat-eaters unless sampling off world food, and the stall I…found these at was in a traditional Druinosi section of the city. But tessek bread lasts for weeks if it’s made properly, and very nutritious.”

Chiana was tempted to taste some, if only to get the sourness of the bar’s cheap fellip nectar out of her mouth, but she remained silent and let him continue his catalogue.

“Another blanket - warmer than the other one, and much better smelling.”

“That wouldn’t take much,” Chiana said wryly, casting a disdainful look at the alcohol stained blanket they’d shared the night before.

Varlin paused before the next item in line and twitched his wings slightly, something Chiana had come to associate with Druinosi in situations of discomfort. She wondered why until she shifted in her seat to have a better view of the object, which he’d removed from the bag out of her line of sight.

A knife. A wicked-looking, four dench blade with a molded black grip and serrated edge. It had never seen use, but its surface gleamed in a way that seemed to smirk and beg to be used. Chiana shivered, remembering entirely too many knives of that same character on too many planets. And as for this particular knife -

“That’s Peacekeeper issue,” she said, almost to herself, but Varlin had the excellent hearing of his race.

“I didn’t know,” he responded quietly, unable to tear his eyes from the weapon. “I’ve never touched a knife like that before. I’ve never used a weapon of any kind. But I almost died - I would have died if you hadn’t shot that man.” Varlin drew a deep, shuddering breath. “It’s time for me to adapt.”

And in that moment, Varlin reminded Chiana more of John Crichton than he ever had - and her heart broke for him.

~*~

The Sebacean language was admirably suited to any number of rather vehement curses, and in the first thirty microts after Crichton fell unconscious for the second time, Aeryn used a choice few of them to describe his mental capacity. And then she realized that the child was still wide awake and staring at her with wide eyes, and the vehement edge to her anger evaporated.

She was still furious - as she had every reason to be - but for now she clamped her lips together in a tight line and swallowed the next string of descriptive metaphors in deference to the impressionable Druinosi who was staring at her.

Once the first burst of fury passed, terror took root, deep-seated and overwhelming. Only the knowledge that so far everything was proceeding exactly as it had before, and things had turned out well then, kept her from succumbing to the desire to grab Crichton and tear him away from the child as quickly as possible.

_Think, Officer Sun,_ she told herself, taking deep breaths and hating herself for the emotions that were obscuring her thoughts.

What had he said about his theory? She tried to remember his exact words, a babble she’d only been listening to with half an ear. The dancing flame in front of her caught her attention, and she scowled at it, momentarily blaming it for taking her attention while Crichton had been talking before.

Bare skin, he had decided, was the key. Right now, his fingertips were still brushing the Druinosi child’s cheek, and when she had touched him before, it had been on his bare hand. If she grabbed the coattails of his jacket and pulled, he would break contact and hopefully emerge from the dream world.

If not, they would both be stuck there until the child fell unconscious again, their bodies prone and an easy mark for the Peacekeeper commandos on their trail.

Aeryn leaned forward, crouching to get a good balance and tentatively brushed her fingertips against the leather of the duster.

Nothing happened.

Deciding her test had been successful, she grabbed two fistfuls of leather and pulled, hard.

  
Crichton’s hand fell from the child’s cheek and his body bounced slightly across the floor of the cave as the force of her pull yanked it away from the child’s body. But within a microt he was awake and rolling over, scrabbling to get his feet underneath him.

Aeryn opened her mouth to remind him of the ceiling, but it was too late. He hit, hard, and let loose an explosive curse in English, one she recognized as an all-purpose expression she’d most often heard when he was working on the Farscape module.

“You didn’t have to pull so hard,” he snarled, touching the top of his head gingerly in much the same way she had done earlier.

“That was one of the more foolish things you’ve done,” she snapped back, more relieved than she was willing to admit that it had worked.

He saw right through her. He always did. “Were you worried about me?”

She ignored it - ignored the ever-so-slight emphasis on me, ignored the insistently chiming voice in the back of her head, ignored the nauseating aftereffects of the intense fear she had just vanquished, and subsumed it all under the façade of Officer Sun.

“There are elite commandos out there looking for us. You deliberately put yourself in a compromising position. You could have killed us both with your ill-advised experiment.” She spat the last word out, infused it with everything that her three years on the run had taught her about the bitterness of John Crichton and his obsessions with science.

And suddenly it seemed as if the air itself was charged with pain, and grief, and everything that should have been but wasn’t, and everything that was that shouldn’t have been, and when Aeryn looked at him all she could see was how blue his eyes were. They were the color of wormholes, his eyes, and when she blinked those eyes went flat and cold and dark, and she tried to blink again and restore the light to them but she couldn’t. There was a rushing in her ears, and her mind was stuck on a fixed loop, of John and wormholes and Crichton and wormholes and no matter how many times it played the end was always the same: he always died and she was always left shattered.

It took every ounce of control that Aeryn Sun the soldier had left to her to pull the pieces of herself back inward, to quiet the rushing in her ears and if she could never stop the constant playback in her mind, at least she could push it so far back in her mind that it didn’t paralyze her.

It must have been only a microt, two microts, because all of a sudden Crichton was answering her words.

“It’s never just science, is it?” He hadn’t directly responded to her, but the way he said the words, the bitter twisting of them in his mouth, told her that his thoughts had been somewhere nearly as painful as her own.

The silence after his words was complete, and just when it seemed too much to bear, the Druinosi child shifted and emitted a childish peeping sound.

“Hey, kiddo,” Crichton said, smiling slightly, just a tiny quirk of his lips but a genuine one. “You have some pretty special gifts.”

Aeryn realized she hadn’t yet asked him whether he’d found what he wanted, and then she realized she didn’t particularly care.

“We have no way of knowing if she even has translator microbes,” she cautioned Crichton. “On less technologically advanced worlds they are often not injected until necessary, later in life.”

He gave her a curious look, one she couldn’t even begin to decipher, and turned back to the child. “Even if she doesn’t understand anything, the tone of my voice will help to reassure her that we’re here to help.” He kept talking to the child, a low murmur of platitudes and comfort.

Aeryn started at the fire instead of looking at him, until she found that even the sound of his voice stirred too much pain. There were so many words that she had heard from that voice, and so many of them this man had never said.

“I’m going to go do reconnaissance,” she said abruptly, checking on her pulse pistol with one hand and her extra chakkan oil cartridge with the other. She stood slowly and moved toward the opening of the cave a few paces until she could stand fully, and then moved briskly toward the exit.

Outside in the night air, she breathed in deeply, the cold air helping to clear some of the dull ache from her head. It was almost dawn, but for now, she had at least an arn more of darkness to be alone and to try and push at least some of the memories back into their dark corners.

~*~

Colven checked her chronometer and stood. There were about two hundred microts left in her watch, and just as Tal had predicted, the first rays of sunrise were beginning to make their way - such as they could - through the dense vegetation of the forest floor.

She looked sideways at Poller, the youngest member of their team, who held his pulse rifle carefully in guard position and scanned the forest floor acutely. He was eager, that one, but all too often he lacked any semblance of common sense. He thought that brainless frontal assault was the best way to show his courage, to prove himself and move ahead in the ranks. He’d obviously watched one too many recruiting vids before he joined up.

But his enthusiasm had gotten him this far, an appointment to a Marauder team. Never mind that this particular Marauder team had been assigned the entirely unenviable task of covert information gathering in the Uncharted Territories. If the universe had a nether region, Nemik was fond of saying, the UTs were it.

Rantor touched her left shoulder with one fingertip, and she turned to look at him impassively. They’d recreated together during the first monen of the assignment, but it had been rather singularly unsatisfying, and while Colven had ended the understanding with a minimum of regrets, Rantor had never quite realized that she truly meant for it to be over. As much as High Command tried to stamp out any other attachments beyond loyalty to the chain of command, she suspected Rantor had never quite internalized that lesson. And he was carrier-born, too. Shame.

She probably never should have started the relationship, but Rantor was the only other officer on the team besides Tal, and she and the Senior Officer had, by necessity, a strictly working relationship. At the time, it had seemed like planning ahead to develop a recreating relationship with Rantor, a way to work off steam throughout what was going to be a very long two cycle deployment. Now, she regretted it, but she refused to let those regrets color her working relationship with the team pilot.

“Yes, Officer Rantor?” Her tone was calculated to discourage him from any personal conversation before he even thought about bringing it up. The middle of a mission was exactly the wrong time for him to try to convince her of one more night’s recreation for old time’s sake.

“Do you really think we’re going to find Crichton?” Rantor asked in a low voice, breathing the insubordinate words into her ear.

Colven let her eyes drift over to where Senior Officer Tal was securing his pack for the hiking they would do today, but kept her head rigidly pointed forward. Rantor, from his position behind her, would have no way of knowing that she had glanced at Tal, and wouldn’t have the chance to misinterpret that glance.

“I have the utmost confidence in Senior Officer Tal,” she said, and she meant it. She’d been Macton Tal’s second in command for their last three deployments, and had been on the same team with him for five deployments beyond that, back when he had held her current position on the Marauder team. If Tal said they could track Crichton, bring him back to Peacekeeper-controlled space, and in doing so end their effective exile to the UTs, she believed him.

“He isn’t even part of our mission profile,” Rantor tried again evasively, his voice taking on the whining quality it did when he was trying to talk her into bed when they both found themselves off shift at the same time.

“He has been part of the secondary mission profile of every Marauder team for the last two and a half cycles, and you know that, Second Officer Rantor.” Full rank, this time, and he knew to back off.

Rantor was silent for a microt or two more, breathing in her ear, and she was tempted to bring her fist up and physically enforce the unspoken order to back away from her, but that would have had to be explained to the Senior Officer. A good second in command knew which problems needed to be brought to her commander’s attention, and which could be quietly monitored. This situation, for the moment, was of the latter, and she saw no reason to force it into the former category.

Rantor stepped away and she relaxed imperceptibly, holding rigid attention for a microt or two more and then checking her chronometer. Ten microts more, and the sun had risen quickly; there was now as much visibility as there was going to be this far below the tree line, and already the air was warmer than Colven would have preferred.

She didn’t move to loosen the collar of her leather uniform. If Senior Officer Tal ordered them to loosen their uniforms, she would do so, but until then, she intended to remain every inch the squared away Peacekeeper commando.

~*~

Jool straightened her back with a pop, stretching out her muscles and uncurling her spine from its hunched position. Her eyes were grainy and dry and she suddenly realized she couldn’t remember the last time she’d eaten.

Someone dropped his hand on her shoulder and she started at the unexpected touch, only to turn around and see the Druinosi who had taken over the shift an arn ago smile at her.

“You should get some rest, Joolushku,” the matronly doctor said, dropping her jaw in a Druinosi grin. “You’ve been working hard.”

“I just had a break.” Hadn’t she? It seemed like only a half arn at most since she had woken on the pallet in the corner of the break room and had a roll. But when she thought about the patients she had treated since then and added it all together, she realized it had been more like twelve arns.

The doctor seemed to know exactly what mental process she was going through. “We’ve all been losing track of day and night, and when we’re supposed to be sleeping and awake. You’ve been working as hard as any of us.”

Jool felt a spasm of guilt. They had no idea who she was, other than that she was of an alien species they didn’t recognize and that she had medical training. They had no idea it was her fault their city was in ashes.

She had, after all, been the one to convince Moya’s crew to stop over on Druinos for supplies. At the time it had seemed like an eminently sensible idea. It was only in hindsight that she would have chosen otherwise. Unbidden, one of Crichton’s foolish human expressions came to her mind.

Jool had no illusions about her relative usefulness in the current quandary. She may have learned more than she’d wanted to over the past cycle about weapons and dangerous situations, but she still had no hope of lasting much longer than thirty microts in an actual firefight. Things like those were best left to Crichton and D’Argo and Chiana. She didn’t know Aeryn nearly as well - it had, after all, only been a few weekens after her awakening that the former Peacekeeper had left with Talyn - but what she’d seen told her that Aeryn Sun could well be the most deadly of the group.

But she needed to help. She didn’t fit the job of drawing the commandos away from Anlach City, she didn’t fit the job of spying on the newly-landed Marauder, and right now there wasn’t much else that could be done to further their situation.

So she’d been helpful in the only way she knew how. And she was stunned to find that she loved it - she loved applying the training that seemed like it had been learned in another lifetime. These people trusted her. They didn’t have any pre-conceived notions about the displaced child who had woken up to find her cousins dead and herself in a situation no textbooks had ever talked about. They just accepted her help, gratefully, and told her she was a hard worker and a valuable asset.

It hadn’t ceased to amaze her since she’d first started working with the medical crews, and it showed no signs of doing so anytime soon.

All of these thoughts passed in the blink of an eye, and Jool smiled back at the doctor. “I think I’ll get some sleep, thank you. I’ll be back in a few arns.”

~*~

D’Argo hid his bulk as best he could behind an overturned fabric cart. He’d arrived at the Marauder’s landing site early, but now the craft was hovering over the flattened landing area, employing landing gear to come to a precise rest next to the previous Marauder.

For long microts, the area was entirely silent and then four commandos dropped from the belly of the Marauder, three taking up guard positions while the fourth crossed to the other Marauder.

With the two ships side by side, D’Argo was able to see quite clearly that the first Marauder, the aggressor, had obviously seen a lot more time in space than the second. Its skin was covered in pits, likely from infitesimally tiny bits of space debris. There was more than one energy scar along its hull, and the red paint of its Peacekeeper markings was scuffed.

By contrast, the new Marauder was barely touched. It looked more suited to a display than a combat mission. The lethally efficient movements of the commandos beneath it belied that impression.

Obviously they had disengaged the lockdown from their own craft before emerging, because the commando approaching the older Marauder didn’t even hesitate as he moved forward, raising a palm to the underside of the ship and pushing. A panel opened, and the commando entered a code sequence.

D’Argo had no idea what the code sequence was, but he filed the fact that Marauders had a code panel like that in an easily accessible place away for future reference. One never knew.

A ramp lowered from the Marauder, and a wave from the Peacekeeper who had keyed the code brought another commando over, weapon at the ready. Together, they moved up the ramp and into the ship, carefully covering each other as if they expected to be entering a hostile vessel.

Interesting. Very interesting. While they may have been in contact previously, they hadn’t been since the first commando team had abandoned their Marauder to go after Crichton and Aeryn. They didn’t know what to expect.

~*~

Senior Officer Bel Fyrkat waited underneath her Marauder, pulse rifle scanning the immediate area, as she waited for the Chief and the Ensign to finish their checks of the ship.

The city was a smoking rubble. She curled her lip with distaste, safe in the fact that her helmet visor was down and Officer Lorium wouldn’t see her so openly expressing her disdain for the way Macton Tal and his team had handed the situation.

For frell’s sake, she had _told_ Tal to back off. She’d all but shoved her orders in his face, had tossed around buzz phrases like “security level one clearance” and “priority mission,” but he’d merely relayed the fact that John Crichton was part of his mission profile too, and that they were closer to the planet.

She’d lost valuable ground with her team during that conversation, as it had been very publicly carried out on the main screen in command. Lorium hadn’t said anything - Lorium never would - but she knew that Chief Strand and Ensign Morz would. As for Officer Garak - one could never tell what he was thinking. Their pilot kept to himself to an extent that had earned him the nickname Solo among the other commandos stationed on the command carrier.

At the thought of the other commandos, Fyrkat’s insides congealed and she was tempted to slam her fist into the landing gear of the Marauder she had taken cover behind. So many of the men and women she had trained with were dead, caught in the fiery explosion that had started very near to the commando living quarters. Right next to the largest docking bays - it was traditional for Marauder crews to live near their ships, ready to deploy at a moment’s notice.

She’d been supervising a tenth-cycle recruit training exercise in one of the habitat rooms along with Lorium when the Leviathan had starburst in the largest hangar on ship. The other three members of their team had been killed instantly, she had learned afterwards, as had fully sixty percent of the elite commandos stationed on Scorpius’s command carrier.

The habitat rooms were on the other side of the command carrier from the large hangar bays, and right next to the hangar bays where refits were done. There was a Marauder there. Her first thought when the evacuation alarms had sounded had been to get to a Marauder.

She’d found Garak and Strand and Morz already there, prepping the Marauder for departure, and they’d blasted their way out of the hangar bay when the doors wouldn’t open. A few microts later and it wouldn’t have mattered either way, because as they cleared the slagged doors the hangar bay evaporated behind them.

They were a disgrace of a team, of that Fyrkat was painfully aware. The ink was barely dry on her promotion to Senior Officer; she hadn’t expected to command a team for monens yet. Lorium and Garak were entirely equal in rank, but she couldn’t tell whether she’d incurred Garak’s wrath or not when she chose Lorium over him for second in command.

Chief Strand had five times her experience and was a veteran of engagements she’d read about in commando training, and whose stance always seemed just short of respectful in her presence, as if he instinctively knew about her constant indecision and condemned her for it. Ensign Morz was a sly, ambitious young woman who was very aware of how precarious Fyrkat’s control of her team really was and had a keen sense of when to push the bounds of authority and when to pretend submissiveness. On the carrier, in a controlled environment, that backstabbing would have been drummed out of her by officers more experienced in insubordination than Fyrkat, but now, on the mission - Morz was getting away with far more than she should, and everyone on the team knew it.

It signaled a frightening level of desperation on behalf of Peacekeeper High Command that their team had been given orders to follow Crichton’s trail and not stay by the debris and escape pods that were all that was left of their home. Fyrkat tried not to dwell on that thought too long, because it inevitably led to fear about just what Crichton was capable of - and Peacekeepers, especially Marauder commandos, did not feel fear.

“Clear.” Strand’s voice even sounded deep through the tinny medium of the looped comm channel.

“Copy,” she responded, and gestured to Lorium to stay with their Marauder as she crossed the short space to the other Marauder.

She pulled her helmet off once inside; the corridors and rooms of a Marauder were tiny enough without the extra encumbrance, and there was no need for the added protection now that there were several metras of titanium between her and any possible threats.

“What have you got?” she asked, moving to stand behind Morz, who had tapped into the Marauder’s command console.

“The Marauder entered on a stealth trajectory and opened fire shortly after clearing the upper tree line. Weapons consoles indicate that roughly 83% of the Marauder’s remaining payload was expended in the assault, which is consistent with our readings of the damage done to the city once allowances are made for materials expended during normal mission parameters. The team has been deployed for nearly eighteen monens now, and though mostly on an intelligence-gathering mission, weapons use is expected on any mission involving Peacekeeper commandos, so the partial depletion of the standard payload prior to arriving on Druinos is entirely within standard operating procedures.”

Fyrkat ground her teeth so hard she was sure Morz must have heard it. Was the Ensign trying to intimate that her Senior Officer wouldn’t frelling know what a typical commando team faced, even when intelligence-gathering? Someone shifted behind her and she realized that Strand was still in command, standing at attention and waiting for her. Just what she needed, more of his silent censure.

Morz would have made a fine Officer someday, had her undermining tactics been properly honed. It was almost with a shade of regret that Fyrkat planned exactly how she was going to bury the Ensign in the cogs of the Peacekeeper system once they returned to civilized space.

“Thank you, Ensign,” she replied sharply, working to keep the snarl out of her voice. “Comm traffic?”

It would have been next in her report anyway, but Fyrkat took a sense of security in forcing Morz’s hand and in keeping Strand waiting even longer.

“They ran silent until after the assault, and then they hijacked every comm signal in the city and broadcast this message.” Morz tapped a button on the console and Macton Tal’s voice filled the command, arrogantly demanding that John Crichton be turned over.

“They didn’t ask for Crichton until after they leveled the city? That’s…” Hideous, she wanted to say. Unfair. “…sloppy,” she finally finished, equally true but not her overriding sentiment. “Anything else?”

“A series of short messages sent on a broad beam that were recorded by the Marauder’s comm station as part of its automatic lockdown procedures.” Another button. “The first is this one.”

Another voice filled the cockpit, and this one Fyrkat recognized. She had only heard his voice once, standing in the ranks as he and the other rebels descended from the transport pod, but it was one she would never forget.

John Crichton.

“Frequency and duration?” she asked, once his voice ended, making his taunt to the commandos.

“Roughly every half-arn for the next five arns, never longer than thirty microts. I haven’t listened to all of them yet, but the last one is this.”

“We’re on the forest floor, Peacekeepers. Come and get us.”

“How long ago was that transmission sent?” Fyrkat asked, feeling her insides congeal at the thought of the human who had destroyed her home and who had the confidence to take on a commando team on unfamiliar territory.

“Almost thirty-six arns ago.”

“Continue analysis of their systems, Morz. Strand?” Fyrkat turned to the Chief, gaze level and stance authoritative. She needed to take every chance she got to reinforce her position.

“Quarters are secured and most of the supplies, including all of the food rations, are gone. Heavy battle armor is still here, which makes sense given that they needed to be moving quickly.”

Nothing out of the ordinary. “Take me to Tal’s quarters.”

It wasn’t much of a hope, but there could be something in his quarters that would tell her what was driving him, why he was putting his entire career on the line to go after John Crichton. There had to be something above and beyond the promise of glory that capturing Crichton offered, even before he had destroyed the command carrier - Tal couldn’t have known about that.

His quarters were bare, simple, much as her own were, much as any Senior Officer’s were. She began opening drawers, ruffling through standard-issue uniforms and off-duty clothing, spare parts to a standard-issue sidearm, and then -

She was beautiful. Shining blonde hair, a bright smile, and sparkling eyes. Beautiful, and very young. Not a Peacekeeper, that much was evident from her dress. And from her smile.

Fyrkat thought for a moment that she was a love interest, but then she remembered the mocking face that had defied her orders, and saw the resemblance. A family member - too old to be a daughter. A sister, perhaps? A cousin?

Whatever the case, she felt fairly sure in the knowledge that she now had her motivation. Now she just needed to find out what this girl had to do with John Crichton and she could go about bringing Macton Tal back in line and making sure that it was she who brought John Crichton back to Peacekeeper territory in chains.

~*~

The tessek bread was disgusting. Chiana refrained from saying so until Varlin had chewed and swallowed his third bite and grimaced.

“I always hated this as a child.” He knocked the edge of his slice against the wood of the bar and the sharp sound made him wince. “But it is good for you. Isn’t that what parents always say to get you to eat something that tastes horrible?”

Chiana ducked her head and stared at her slice of tessek bread and the small corner she’d succeeded in breaking off and swallowing thus far. “I wouldn’t know.”

Varlin swiveled in his seat to look at her. “You didn’t know your parents?”

She focused her attention on the slice of bread and was able to break off another small piece, which she rolled between her fingers for a moment. “I knew them. Just not very well. They died when I was pretty young.” She put the piece in her mouth and willed her saliva to soften it enough to swallow, but didn’t hold out much hope for that happening any time soon.

“Oh.” Varlin clearly hadn’t considered the possibility that she had had anything but the same stable, simple upbringing he had. “Did you - how - ” He hung his head and clacked his beak, seemingly ashamed. “I’m sorry, I’m prying.”

Maybe she was getting used to the tessek bread, because this time she was able to roll it around her tongue and make it edible in a fairly short time. She swallowed hard and rolled her shoulder in response to Varlin’s hesitation. “It was a long time ago. I had an older brother, Nerri. I have an older brother,” she corrected herself, because it was the technical truth, even if it didn’t seem likely that she would ever see him again. “I haven’t seen him…in a long time. We didn’t fit in. My people don’t like that.” She was unable to hold back a rueful snort. “They really don’t like that.”

“You miss him,” Varlin said, and nodded. “I miss my family, and it’s only been a few monens since I’ve seen them. They live in another city about an arn away. I came to Anlach City to study about four turns ago. It was hard to leave them behind. So I know how you feel.”

There were about a million differences between fleeing the threat of imminent mind-cleansing and moving an arn away to pursue esoteric research, but Chiana didn’t feel like listing them all out for her naïve young friend. “Yeah.”

“You should go see him,” Varlin decided, and the tessek bread turned even more sour than it already was in Chiana’s mouth.

“I don’t think so. It’s complicated.” Crichton’s words echoed again in her mind, and she remembered the feel of her own blood on her hands, the screaming pain of the control collar, and the knot of unshed tears.

Varlin just looked at her, chewing away at the tessek bread, and she swallowed. The piece of bread was dry and hard and stuck in her throat, making her nauseous, and she reached for the bottle of fellip nectar in front of her, willing even to brave its foul taste to assuage the rawness in her throat.

“I still think you should find him.”

It was probably the fellip nectar making its way to her brain, but for just a split-microt, she thought that she should go find him, too. No. She shook her head sharply and pushed that wistful thinking as far out of her thoughts as it would go.

~*~

“We need to keep moving,” Aeryn said, returning to the cave from her search of the area. “And we need to cover our tracks better. A blind drannit could find us right now.”

Crichton had his thumbs stuck in his ears and his fingers stuck out at right angles to his head, and the Druinosi child was chuffing and clacking her beak. Aeryn assumed that was her equivalent of a laugh, and when she came around to look Crichton in the face she saw that he had his tongue stuck out and eyes screwed shut in a bizarre facial expression.

Despite herself, she almost smiled, until she remembered the unborn child inside of her, and tightened her grip on the butt of her pulse pistol so hard she could feel the bone in her knuckles scrape together painfully. “Crichton. Did you hear me?”

“Yeah, I heard you, Aeryn.” He smiled once more at the child and stood, brushing his leathers off. He reached out for her arm, presumably to guide her away from the child so they could talk, and she swerved, unwilling to let him touch her. His lips pressed together in a thin line and he hooked his thumbs in his belt loops instead.

They walked a few paces toward the entrance of the cave, dimly lit now that the fire had almost burned down during the night.

“We need to take care of the commandos,” he said quietly, and the John Crichton who had made faces at a child to make her laugh was entirely gone, replaced with the hard, dangerous man who was more familiar to her - at least from the past few weekens.

Aeryn nodded in agreement. “They will be tracking us using the Marauder’s sensors. We have no way of knowing how close they are, but there will be at least three of them.”

“Can the sensors penetrate through all this green stuff?” He gestured to the opening of the cave, where they could see the thick, damp vegetation.

“I don’t know,” Aeryn admitted. That was a tech’s knowledge base, not hers. “It’s not something we should assume.”

“Yeah.” A pause for thought. “Ambush.”

Aeryn nodded again, and took a deep breath. “It’s the easiest way.”

Neither of them wanted to say it out loud, but they both knew full well that they would have to stay in one place long enough to know where the commandos were relative to them, and then plan accordingly.

“Cat and mouse,” Crichton murmured. “Damn. I just wish she weren’t involved.” He was watching the child play with a stick she had pulled from Aeryn’s kindling pile, drawing patterns on the ground with her vestigial hands and cooing at them.

“She would have died,” Aeryn reminded him, carefully not looking at either of them. “We should move from here and find somewhere to make another, obvious camp. Somewhere we can hide near.”

“Okay.” Crichton seemed to gather himself and looked up at her for a moment. She froze at the worry in his eyes, unwilling to allow herself to be a participant in any of it. He would pull her back in all over again, and he would die again, and she couldn’t survive his death twice.

She broke the contact and ducked under an outcropping to kick the remains of the fire apart while Crichton talked to the girl, words that she had no way of understanding but still burbled happily at.

Within a quarter arn they were packed and making their way through the forest again.

~*~

Colven watched as Rantor stood and brushed dirt from his gloves with a fastidious look of disgust, quickly hidden when Tal turned, his face impassive, to hear his report.

“We’re near the end of the trail - they were slowing down. The tracks are more scuffed, irregular. They were tired. I doubt they slept.”

Tal nodded slowly, his face still unreadable. “Continue.” He spoke softly into his comm to Poller and Nemik, who were scouting ahead and had paused on Tal’s command when Rantor knelt to examine the tracks.

Colven, in her position as tech specialist, had modified their equipment during the first half of her watch. The vegetation was playing havoc with most of their electronics, and she’d had to reprogram half the system to function on a tight-band group frequency. It would work as long as they stayed within certain parameters. That had severely limited the distance Poller and Nemik could scout ahead, but Colven knew that both she and Tal would much rather have group cohesion than a forty-metra guard perimeter.

“Got something.” That was Nemik, his voice low and quiet. “Cave entrance, a great deal of scuffling and no small amount of vegetation disturbance.”

They paused again and Colven double-checked to make sure the safety on her pulse pistol was off. Rantor flicked the safety on his pulse rifle off and on again in his own version of the same double-check.

“Poller, move in to back up,” Tal said quietly, and Colven glanced at him. There was a tremor of - something in his voice that she had never heard in all her cycles of serving with him. Something pinged in the back of her head; a low-level warning that usually went off right before they were ambushed by an unseen sentry or blocked by an unexpectedly locked door.

She frowned and squeezed the handle of her pulse pistol tighter, the leather of her gloves creaking slightly.

Rantor flicked the safety again, and again, the sound sharp in the otherwise eerie natural quiet. Tal gave no sign of noticing it, his eyes peering into the vegetation in Nemik and Poller’s direction, as if trying to see through the thick greenery.

Click click. Click click. Click -

“_Rantor_.”

Rantor started slightly and clicked the safety off one final time, moving his hand down to the firing mechanism instead. He didn’t meet her eyes, which was probably for the best - all she would have been able to offer him would have been a very unprofessional glare.

“Location empty,” Nemik’s voice came to them, and Colven was keenly disappointed. Every microt longer it took to find Crichton was another microt away from their Marauder and their original mission.

She would follow Macton Tal anywhere, and he knew that, but she was first and foremost a Peacekeeper - and he knew that too. Something about this sidetrack wasn’t right. They had a primary mission objective to fulfill, and taking more than forty-eight arns away from it was unacceptable by Peacekeeper standards. They were very rapidly approaching that ceiling.

And now she had the added pressure of wondering what it was that had given Tal his personal stake in John Crichton’s capture.

~*~

D’Argo counted the commandos exiting the aggressor Marauder and found all accounted for. The last Peacekeeper reached once again to the control panel on the ship’s underbelly and closed the ramp, no doubt re-enabling the security system as well.

The four of them - it didn’t look like the fifth team member would be exiting their Marauder - seemed to be holding a conference under their Marauder which ended when the commando D’Argo had already mentally tagged as the leader gesturing to each of the other three commandos in turn; assigning tasks?

Either way, they were re-entering their Marauder but not taking off. He judged it safe to contact Rygel once they were all on board, and pulling back fully into the plaza he had been spying from.

He reported what he had seen and his impressions. “They’re either preparing to take off, or planning the next stage of their operation.”

“They’re not taking off,” Rygel returned, his voice contemplative. “They are in all likelihood equipping themselves to find John Crichton for themselves. I believe you have answered my questions admirably, D’Argo. The first Marauder is acting contrary to - or at least outside of - the Peacekeeper chain of command. Interesting.”

“They’re getting out,” D’Argo replied, and disabled the comm channel quickly when he heard the tamp of booted feet on the resin floor of the landing pad behind him. He edged back over to get a good view.

Four commandos, geared up, helmets removed. He quickly identified the Senior Officer by the way she issued orders, but unless he was reading something wrong, the team dynamic was off. These were not perfectly trained, perfectly meshed Peacekeeper commandos - they acted more like individuals, each one seeming to weigh the order he or she was given and then deign to follow it.

The entire situation was becoming more and more odd by the microt.

~*~

“Here.” Aeryn stopped at the edge of the clearing and surveyed it. If they hadn’t found the cave, she would have picked this spot last night - which was exactly what they wanted the Peacekeepers following them to see as well.

She slid her pack to the ground and began the process of setting up the campsite as if they’d spent the night there: scuffing the ground, beating back the vegetation, and clearing a space for a fire.

Behind her, Crichton set the child down and stood again, his back cracking as he stretched. “Aeryn, I’m getting worried about Cricket. She’s spending far too much time unconscious.”

Aeryn paused in mid-scuff and stared at him. “Cricket?”

“It’s a - never mind. It was the noise she made.” He looked down at the child, and Aeryn knew the look on his face all too well. It was the look that said John Crichton was going to protect this innocent, “come hell or high water.”

She shook her head slightly to shake the memory of John’s voice saying that, because she knew well that this Crichton had never said it to her and would instantly become suspicious if she said it out loud. “Crichton, in perhaps a half an arn, a Peacekeeper commando squad is going to arrive with every intent of capturing us. What do you expect us to be able to do for the child until after we’ve taken care of the commandoes?”

He looked at her and his jaw opened once or twice before snapping shut. She imagined she could hear his teeth grinding together and relished the fury on his face. It was better than the tenderness he had shown the child; that had snuck its way into her gut and touched off thoughts she didn’t want loosened. Not now. Later, when she was alone and a hundred thousand metras away from Moya and Crichton, she would deal with those thoughts.

She was right, and they both knew it. Crichton bent down one more time, making sure the child was comfortable, and Aeryn returned to making the clearing look like they’d stayed the night.

Ashes and coal from the fire in the cave, carefully tucked away in a leather pouch, were placed in a logical place for a fire, and Aeryn broke a few pieces of kindling and placed them near the ashes. She had no idea what she was doing, and was inventing each step as she went along - like she’d once told John, so long ago, she was only trained to fly and to secure another craft if hers was no longer functional. There had been a comfort in that, in knowing that she was prepared for every situation she could conceivably face.

Next, she laid down by the fire, wriggling her body slightly so that it looked like she had slept there. She stood to see Crichton looking at her, lip caught between his teeth as he tried not to smile. She glared at him, but that only seemed to make him try harder not to let the grin escape.

Frelling human. “We need to find somewhere near here to take cover. They’ll have sent out advance scouts first; when those arrive we take them first. Stay here with Cri - ” Frell. She shut her mouth so quickly she nearly caught her tongue in her teeth, took a deep breath and tried again. “Stay here with the child. I’ll be back in a few microts.”

She moved in circles about the campsite, careful not to disturb the ground cover too much, obscuring her tracks. After a short time of searching, she found a thickly covered mound a few metras from the “campsite,” adequately raised to provide cover for both her and Crichton and the child.

Aeryn moved stealthily back to the campsite, eyeing the angle of trajectory from the mound. They would only have a few shots to take out the advance guards. She was just short of the small clearing when she heard the laugh.

Crichton’s laugh. John’s laugh. She hadn’t heard it in so long; not like this, carefree and happy. It was so incongruous to the situation that she couldn’t do anything but stare at Crichton kneeling next to the child, hands spread wide as he obviously illustrated a story to her.

“And you know what? The smallest bed was _just right_. So she laid down in it, and fell fast asleep. She was so deeply asleep that she didn’t hear the bear family come home. In came the Papa Bear, and the Mama Bear, and the Baby Bear. And the Papa Bear looked down at his porridge and he said ‘Somebody’s been eating my porridge!’”

Crichton made his voice gruff and his face menacing, and the child chirped in a Druinosi giggle. “And Mama Bear looked down at her porridge and said, ‘Somebody’s been eating _my_ porridge!’ And then the Baby Bear looked at _his_ porridge, and he said ‘Somebody’s been eating my porridge, too! And it’s _all gone_!’”

His voice ascended the range until it was barely a squeak for the Baby Bear, and still Aeryn couldn’t move. With a start, she realized that her hand had left the grip of her pulse pistol and was pressed flat against her stomach. She looked down and jerked her fingers away as if they had been burned, remolding her palm to the ridges of the pistol.

“And so they all went upstairs, and Papa Bear looked at his bed and he said, ‘Somebody’s been sleeping in my bed!’ And Mama Bear looked at her bed and said ‘Somebody’s been sleeping in _my_ bed!’ And then the Baby Bear, he looked in his bed, and he said ‘Somebody’s been sleeping in my bed, too! And she’s _still there_!”

The child’s chirping was more enthusiastic this time, and she watched Crichton’s face avidly.

“And - you know what, I don’t know what happened next.” His voice was stricken, and Aeryn was catapulted from his imaginary land of Bears and porridge back into the hot, rank jungle. He was telling children’s stories, but to a child who was seriously injured and possibly orphaned because of trouble they had brought to this planet. And there was no guarantee that she would live beyond the next few arns when the commandoes arrived.

Aeryn forced one foot in front of the other and entered the clearing. “I found a place to hide - it’s not far from here. Bring the child.” She didn’t trust herself with more than that.

She led him to the mound and he set the child down behind it, careful not to touch her skin. Aeryn had already flattened herself out, laying on her stomach so that her entire body was behind the mound, and he mimicked her actions, squirming to stay behind the cover of the mound.

His entire length was pressed against her side, and she ground her teeth against the warmth coming from his body. It was fast approaching midday, and the sun was beating down and turning the forest floor into a steaming haze - and still, she could identify the warmth along the left side of her body as coming distinctly from him.

She forced herself to return her attention to the clearing, watching it so intently that Crichton’s voice in her ear nearly made her jump.

“Now what?” he whispered, and his breath tickled the wisps of hair that hadn’t yet plastered to the side of her head from sweat.

“We wait,” she replied, keeping her eyes on the clearing.

~*~

“Chiana.”

Chiana was jerked out of a light doze by D’Argo’s voice, and she blinked rapidly to get her bearings. The bar. Not the back alleys on Nebari Prime. Varlin. Not Nerri.

She groped for her comm. “Yeah, I’m here.”

“We’re coming to get you. Keep this comm channel open so that Moya can track you - the transport pod should be there soon.”

“D’Argo, wait.” She sat up and brought the comm closer to her mouth, voice tight with urgency. “What’s happening? Are John and Aeryn all right?”

There was a pause entirely too long for her peace of mind, and D’Argo’s voice didn’t sound at all confident. “Things are going to end soon, one way or the other. We’re making sure everyone’s together in case we need to leave quickly.”

In case. Chiana snorted softly, trying to remember the last time they hadn’t needed to leave quickly.

She nudged Varlin, who was sound asleep next to her. “Wake up. We’re getting rescued.”

~*~

“We have a signal from Tal’s team, Senior Officer, but no communication. It looks like their systems are down. They could be running outdated equipment - their records say they were deployed for nearly two cycles.” Morz’s voice had lost some of its insouciance, and she had referred to Fyrkat by her proper rank.

No sense in taking it for granted. “Could it be due to the vegetation of the forest floor?” Her tone suggested that Morz should have brought that possibility up already, which was true.

The helmet hid the Ensign’s face, but Fyrkat wouldn’t have been surprised to see a flush. “Yes. In fact, that’s very likely.”

“Where are they now, relative to our position?”

Morz shook her head slightly as she toggled the equipment. “Not far at all, Senior Officer. Once they reached the forest floor, they seem to have doubled back toward the center of the city - not that they’d have any way of knowing that, if their equipment was malfunctioning.”

Fyrkat paused for a microt, seemingly pondering the next course of action, but in reality she’d decided on it the moment the Marauder had touched down. “We go after them ourselves. Chief Strand, take point; Ensign Morz, keep us apprised of the other team’s position.”

Strand led with Morz close behind, and Lorium trailed behind and to her right in a position they were both comfortable with from cycles of training. She knew she shouldn’t feel better that it was Lorium there, but she’d never been able to fully accept the Peacekeeper philosophy of interchangeable parts - at least, not when it came to Graer Lorium.

Dear Graer. How many cycles, now, of cramped quarters and stale journey rations, easy, comfortable recreation, sparring bouts, heart-poundingly dangerous missions, drilling of cadets? She had lost count. But of all the hundreds of soldiers she’d known in her career, Lorium came the closest to any she would have admitted to loving, dangerous as that sentiment was.

But before all else, she loved the Peacekeepers. He felt the same way. It was what had always saved them in the end.

Strand came to a halt. The path in front of them was charred and unstable. They backtracked to the kavench tree they had just exited, Morz gestured to a stairway. Strand led again as they moved down it, all without a single word.

Fyrkat let a satisfied smile creep onto her face and felt the energy of a new mission finally begin to replace the desperation of the chase they’d been on for the past few days.

~*~

“Second campsite found,” Nemik reported.

“I’ve got it,” Poller added, his voice hyper-eager, and Colven nearly winced.

Tal was ahead of her. “Maintain position, Poller.”

“I’m already there, Senior Officer.” His voice actually sounded hurt, and Rantor snorted beside her. He flicked the safety on his pulse pistol once more before she gave him a warning glare.

Tal’s lips pressed to a thin line, but there was nothing he could do now. “Report.”

“Looks like - ” A high whine pierced the comm system, and Colven swore and clapped her hand to her ear in an automatic reaction. She didn’t remove it - she’d made that mistake on her first mission, and had received a backhanded blow from the Senior Officer that had broken her cheekbone, and they had only been an arn into a four arn infiltration.

“Poller!” Nemik’s yell followed the feedback whine, which Colven now recognized as having resulted from the destruction of one of the comm units in their tight band. “Taking fire, request back - ”

“Frell!” Rantor snarled, and with a look at Tal, received his permission. He sprinted forward in the direction Nemik and Poller had been scouting, and Colven and Tal jogged behind him. Colven looked at Tal for her own orders, and he circled his hand. She nodded her comprehension and trotted off to the left while he moved to the right.

~*~

Aeryn’s shot took the commando - a boy, really - squarely in the ear, and his skull exploded.

_Should’ve been wearing your helmet,_ she thought absentmindedly, but knew that she wouldn’t have been wearing hers either. It was fully noon, and the heat was almost more than she could take before she would have to start peeling layers of clothing off.

Crichton’s shot missed the second commando, obviously older and more experienced, who dropped to his knees and returned fire in their direction. Crichton yelped and ducked behind the mound.

Aeryn’s mind was no longer concentrating on anything but the feel of the pulse pistol in her hands and the line of sight from the muzzle to the commando’s head. She breathed in, out - and fired.

Her shot caught him in the shoulder. _Too low, frell it all._ She adjusted quickly and compensated for his jerky movements. This time, the shot took off the top of his head and he fell backwards, twitching.

“There will be more,” she hissed to Crichton, her voice sounding hoarse and unnatural in her ears. Crichton was breathing heavily, probably from the stress of being under fire. Her detachment kept her blissfully numb and calm, and she realized that it was probably the first time she’d been so settled since Dam-Ba-Da.

He nodded jerkily and inched his way back up to watch the clearing.

~*~

Jool’s steps on the stairs of the transport pod let everyone know just how angry she was about having been called back so abruptly. She made every step count, and entering the cabin refused to talk to either D’Argo or Rygel, but flounced into a corner and picked a patch of the wall to glare at.

“Rygel, Moya’s sensors are showing Chiana’s location as some ways from your current position. I have downloaded the coordinates to the transport pod’s navigational system.”

“Understood, Pilot,” Rygel answered, and watched as the numbers flicked onto the screen. He didn’t have much more to do than nudge the pod into the pre-programmed flight plan. He hesitated briefly before doing so, and received in response D’Argo’s snarl from just behind him.

Rygel didn’t bother to hide the self-satisfied smile. He knew full well that the Luxan, with his superior physical size, would never permit them to leave while there was still a chance Crichton and Aeryn were alive - something which Rygel considered at the very edge of the realm of possibility - but as long as he was being forced against his will into this rescue, he might as well play with the Luxan’s small mind a bit.

The transport pod made its way toward the edge of the city, the kavench trees growing thinner - relatively speaking - and the surviving bridge structure more unkempt.

~*~

“They‘re both down,” Rantor reported, his voice barely above a whisper. “Frelling good shots, too. They’re somewhere around here.”

Colven stepped around the branch carefully and settled her boot to the ground slowly, step by painstaking step as she moved silently. With each movement she scanned the area in front of her closely, looking for a hint that someone had been there recently.

There - was that her imagination, or was that leaf freshly torn? She inched forward and looked more closely. Not only was the leaf underneath her fingers freshly torn, but several of the branches were bent - by someone’s passage.

“I’m going to - I’m going to make sure they’re dead.” Something about Rantor’s tone of voice made Colven think there wasn’t much choice Nemik and Poller were still alive.

“Negative, Rantor, do not enter the clearing - ” Tal’s voice was quick and more than slightly angry. This was the second time one of their team members had advanced without express permission.

This time, the feedback whine didn’t take Colven by surprise.

~*~

“Will there be any more?” Crichton asked. He’d redeemed his earlier miss by catching the new commando squarely in the throat.

“There’s no way to know for sure,” Aeryn replied. “Worst case scenario, there’s at least one more. Commando teams always leave at least one person with the Marauder.”

“Great.” Crichton looked over his shoulder at the child. “What are we supposed to do, just hang out here until we’re sure there’s no one else? That could be arns.”

“Do you have a better plan?” Sweat trickled down her forehead, but she didn’t dare loosen her hands from the pulse pistol to wipe the moisture away.

“No,” he replied sullenly. “I’m going to make sure Cricket’s okay. No kid should have to experience something like this.” He slid down the back of the mound and turned toward the child.

Aeryn looked back at the bodies in the clearing, at the splattered gore, and remembered a hundred training accidents and blood-stained uniforms.

“Don’t move.”

~*~

Fyrkat’s feet touched the ground with a jolt, and she unlatched the line from her belt, tugging it sharply and moving away. Lorium would be right behind her.

“Report.”

Morz looked at the instrumentation once again. “Well, it’s not the best clarity I’ve ever seen, but I can give you an approximate location of two thousand metras in that direction.” She pointed to her right.

“Margin of error?”

“A hundred metras.”

“Understood.” She turned to see Lorium securing the line to the tree - they would need it to get back up. “Proceed. Take Strand and scout ahead.”

Morz nodded, and Strand swept the surrounding area with his pulse rifle one more time before following after Morz at a jog.

“Frell all, but it’s hot.” Lorium’s voiced buzzed in her left ear only, a private comm channel.

“Don’t take your helmet off,” she warned. She was probably being overly cautious on her first mission in command, but she remembered John Crichton’s cocky swagger in front of Scorpius and toggled the comm back so she could relay the order to Morz and Strand too. “Under no circumstances are you to remove your helmets.”

“Understood.”

~*~

“Okay, okay.” Crichton had already put his pulse pistol down - foolish human - and raised his hands in the air.

“Drop your pulse pistol, Sun, or I’ll shoot him,” the Peacekeeper warned, and Aeryn slowly loosened her fingers on the pulse pistol’s grip. “Now. Throw it toward me.”

Aeryn didn’t move, keeping the pulse pistol trained on the commando, who responded by moving forward a step to rest the muzzle of her pistol directly against Crichton’s head.

Aeryn’s hands and arms seemed to move of their own accord as something akin to panic swept over her. She threw the pulse pistol to the ground at the other woman’s feet.

“Very good. Now, I want you to both stand slowly and hold your hands out to me.” She reached for her belt with her left hand and produced two sets of ties. Before moving forward, however, she spoke to whoever was at the other end of the comm set attached to her head. “I’ve got them.”

Crichton had obeyed immediately, and Aeryn followed reluctantly, holding her hands out, wrists together, wondering why Crichton was being so docile even as she planned how to knock the pulse pistol from the commando’s hand.

The woman held out one set of ties to Crichton. “Put them on.”

“You’re kidding me, right?” Crichton snarled, and the Peacekeeper shoved her pistol into his forehead again in a gesture that would no doubt leave a painful bruise behind. “Fine.”

He reached out for the ties, but instead of taking the metal, he grabbed her wrist, his fingers sliding underneath her sleeve at the same time as he tugged down, hard.

Crichton and the commando went down in a tangle, and Aeryn dove for her pulse pistol. She hit the ground hard, driving small rocks and wood splinters into her palms, but she found her pistol and rolled left, away from the range of the Peacekeeper’s booted feet.

Which were strangely slack.

Aeryn stared at the commando’s immobile feet for a microt before looking up.

Crichton had been searching for bare skin when he’d thrust his fingers up her sleeve - and when he’d hit the ground, he had immediately reached out with his other hand to touch the child’s face.

The young Druinosi stared at Aeryn with huge eyes, tears seeping out and dripping down to where Crichton’s fingers were pressed firmly against her cheek.

~*~

“Who’s that?”

“This is Varlin. He saved my life. Get out of the way,” Chiana answered simply. She didn’t have the patience for D’Argo’s simplistic Luxan possessiveness right now.

“We don’t have time to bring him back to the city,” Rygel called down from inside the transport pod.

“Spend the whole attack sitting in the pod, Rygel?” she shot back, and crossed her arms and tried to intimidate D’Argo into moving out of the way of the transport pod ramp despite her lesser size.

“Rygel is right,” D’Argo said in a tone of voice that suggested he would rather be saying almost anything else.

“Chiana, it’s all right, I can just fly away,” Varlin urged. His eyes asked her not to make this an issue.

_It isn’t fair,_ Chiana sulked inwardly. Varlin had saved her life, had stayed with her, and now she was going to have to abandon him without a backward glance. But the rational, calculating part of her that had been developed on the streets knew that it was the smartest thing to do.

She turned and threw her arms around Varlin, taking him by surprise as he folded his wings awkwardly around her. “Find your professor,” she told him, all too aware that it might be a futile mission.

“Find your brother,” he whispered back, and hugged her tightly. When she pulled away, another feather drifted to the ground. He bent down to pick it up and tucked it in her ear.

Chiana blinked once, twice, and turned to ascend the now vacant ramp into the transport pod at a jog, never looking back.

~*~

Aeryn stood, paralyzed, a thousand possibilities running through her mind. She couldn’t just shoot the commando where she lay; there was no telling what that would do to either Crichton or the child.

Her mind arrived at the next-best course of action: pulling the Peacekeeper out of direct contact with Crichton by grasping some piece of her uniform. Keeping a firm hold on her pulse pistol with her right hand, Aeryn reached forward with her left hand to grab the bottom of the woman’s jacket.

But before she could do that, the woman and the child both began to convulse, violent seizures wracking their bodies. Wasting no more time, Aeryn grabbed the woman’s jacket and pulled as hard as she could, separating her from Crichton - who began to convulse as well.

She grabbed Crichton’s jacket and pulled him away, too, and he came awake instantly. When his hand left the child’s face, the young Druinosi’s seizures grew more severe, and within microts blood trickled out from the corner of her mouth.

Crichton blinked once, readjusting to his surroundings, and then he saw the child. “Oh - God. I’m sorry, I’m so sorry,” he said, rolling back to be next to the child, hands hovering over her but unable to touch.

“Crichton, what the frell happened? What did you do to the commando?” Aeryn was shocked to find that she still had a voice as she watched the child convulse in horror.

“I pushed her off the Empire State Building,” he said simply, as if that was an answer. “I just didn’t know - I wasn’t sure - oh, God, Cricket, I’m so sorry. This is my fault.”

The child’s body bucked once more, and then fell back to the earth, limp. Crichton’s hand touched her throat for a pulse before Aeryn could warn him about being pulled back into the dream world.

Only this time he wasn’t pulled in.

“She’s dead,” he said quietly.

“The commando - ” Aeryn repeated, and turned back to the woman.

She was gone.

~*~

“We should be approaching Tal’s position soon,” Morz warned. Fyrkat nodded, even though Morz wasn’t there to see it.

“Copy.”

~*~

“Get us out of here. Now,” Aeryn said into the comm, her voice taut with grief. Crichton still sat next to the child’s body, legs sprawled out in front of him, arms resting on his knees as he stared at the ground. “Have Moya lock onto my comm signal.”

“It’s going to be difficult to navigate the transport pod through the density of the lower forest…”

“Now, Rygel.”

“I’m reading a clearing of sufficient size for a transport pod to land approximately one hundred metras away from you, Officer Sun,” Pilot informed her.

“We’ll be there,” D’Argo’s voice assured her. Aeryn closed the comm channel and turned to Crichton.

“Crichton?” she asked gently, her eyes carefully staying away from the body. He didn’t respond. “John?”

His head snapped up, and Aeryn saw that his eyes were red-rimmed. “Rygel is going to have a transport pod in a clearing near here. We need to move. The commando is gone for now, but she could be back, no matter how badly injured she was.” She spoke slowly as she would to a child - and wrenched her mind away from that train of thought.

He nodded slowly, and turned to look at the child, a shudder passing through his body. Without a word, he slid his arms under her still form and lifted, standing up awkwardly.

Aeryn gave one last look around the area and led the way to the clearing.

~*~

“I’ve found someone, Senior Officer.”

“Someone, Ensign?”

“One of Tal’s team, ma’am.”

“You’re not being specific enough, Ensign.”

“You need to come see for yourself, ma’am.”

Fyrkat moved into a jog, inwardly seething. Morz had crossed the line into outright insubordination and she was going to pay dearly this time.

Strand was already there, even though he was supposed to be scouting a different area than Morz, and Fyrkat’s fury redoubled. Obviously, the Ensign had called the Chief before she’d called her Senior Officer.

“What is it, Ensign?”

“I - she - ” Morz stuttered to a stop, and spread her hands wide, indicating the body sprawled on the ground before her.

“Is she alive?” Lorium asked.

“Yes, sir. Barely.”

“Strand, Lorium, guard the perimeter.” Fyrkat knelt on the opposite side of the body from Morz. No outward sign of injury. “Report, Officer.”

The woman’s eyes flickered open, and Fyrkat almost recoiled. The woman’s eyes weren’t just bloodshot - every vessel in them seemed to have burst, staining the entire surface a dark red. Just as quickly as her eyes had opened, they closed again.

She coughed, and a thin line of blood trickled from her mouth.

“Officer Colven, report.” There had only been one woman with Macton Tal’s team, and Fyrkat had lost count of how many times she’d studied the team’s bios on their journey here.

Colven’s eyes snapped open again, and she opened her mouth as if to talk. Nothing but a thin whistling sound emerged.

Fyrkat looked down and felt a sickening dread in her stomach. Crichton, again, responsible for so many deaths. Colven wouldn’t live beyond the next few microts.

She slid her pulse pistol out of its holster and placed it against Colven’s temple. The other woman must have felt the cold metal against her skin, because her lips turned upward in something that was almost a smile.

Fyrkat pulled the trigger, and Morz jumped back in horror.

“Mercy, Ensign.” She cleaned off the muzzle of the pistol and re-holstered it. “Find Crichton. Now.”

Morz gulped and bobbed her head, jumping to her feet. Strand followed her.

~*~

“I think I remember how it ends,” Crichton said quietly, and Aeryn stopped watching for the transport pod for a moment to glance sideways at him. He wasn’t talking to her. “My mom always told me that Goldilocks lived happily ever after with the Three Bears, and that she and Baby Bear were the best of friends because they could share everything that was just right.”

Aeryn tore her eyes away from Crichton and went back to watching for the transport pod - which chose that moment to arrive.

Crichton seemed not to have heard it arrive, and she had to tug on his sleeve to get his attention. He looked at the pod, and then at her, as if he hadn’t been expecting the pod, and she pulled again on his sleeve as she stood up, bringing him to his feet.

She made sure he went first - she didn’t trust him to follow her, not as far removed from reality as he was at the moment.

She ascended the steps behind Crichton and breathed a shallow sigh of relief when the transport pod took off the moment the stairs were folded back into it.

~*~

“Three more bodies, Senior Officer.” Strand, this time. Morz seemed to have lost her taste for always being in front.

“All dead?”

“Yes, ma’am. Tal is still missing.”

“Frell,” Lorium’s voice breathed in her left ear.

“Frell is right,” she agreed, and for the thousandth time since the command carrier, she wished she’d never heard the name John Crichton.

A dull roar momentarily overwhelmed all the other sounds in the area, and she ducked instinctively. That was a starship engine.

“Leviathan transport pod!” Lorium yelled over the noise. “Not more than twenty metras from here.”

Fyrkat took off at a dead run, Lorium close behind her.

They were too late; the transport pod’s stairs were being raised as they reached the edge of the clearing. Lorium squeezed off a shot that splashed harmlessly off the skin, but it had been fired out of frustration rather than out of any attempt to impede the pod.

She watched the transport pod make its ponderous way through the trees, rising to the level of the city, and knew that there was no chance of catching it. The Leviathan would starburst before they even reached the line Lorium had so carefully fastened to the tree.

“Any indications that Tal is near?” she asked, more out of a sense of cleaning up the remnants of the mission than an interest. He had led his team into a massacre; for all she cared, he could be suffering as Colven had on the forest floor somewhere. She wouldn’t give him mercy.

“None. He’s vanished.”

“Then he can frelling well stay vanished,” she snarled on the private channel, and Lorium’s grunt was one of agreement.

“Regroup and fall back to where we descended. We’re going back to the city level.”

~*~

“Hey.”

He didn’t move, and Chiana stole forward to touch him lightly on the shoulder. “Crichton?”

He started slightly, and looked up at her. His eyes were even more hollow than before, and he looked away quickly so he could concentrate again on his arms and the incomprehensible symbols he was drawing there.

She didn’t take her hand away and watched him, mesmerized. “Think you can get back to Earth with those?”

He stopped writing and held a hand up, turning it from side to side in front of his face as if to follow a line that began at the base of his thumb and looped around to circle the knuckle. “Maybe.”

His other hand came up to join the first, pen between ink-stained fingers. He added a dash, crossed it, and circled the cross, and then an arrow leading toward an already existing oval-within-square that covered the knuckle of his third finger.

“What does that mean?” she asked him, her tone light.

His lips twitched downward into a frown. “I don’t know.”

~*~

Aeryn closed her eyes and sank into the comfortable spareness of her Prowler seat. The hatch was open, and she could hear D’Argo lining up trunks on the other side of the hangar bay. He’d spent the better part of eight arns hunting up every container on Moya to hold provisions, and now it seemed he had narrowed down his picks and was beginning to pack them.

Below it all was the ambient hum of Moya’s fluids circulating through the walls and floors and ceiling, and if she listened hard enough, below that was the whisper that spoke to her of where the DRDs were, of routine refitting and minute course corrections. It was a murmur that she had taught herself to ignore, most of the time, but now she embraced it willingly, storing the sounds in her memory.

She pushed herself out of the seat on an exhale, hopping out of the cockpit, taking a deep breath, and calling out to D’Argo not to use all the containers.

~*~

The bottle was cold and heavy in her hand, and by the carefully noted label, its contents had ceased their usefulness monens ago.

Jool shook the container, and the dried herbs swirled around gently. She placed it back on the shelf, careful to once again fill the void left as the dust had settled around the bottle.

“What are you doing?” Rygel’s voice asked, and if she didn’t know better, she would have said he was angry.

“No one’s been in here since Zhaan died,” she mused out loud, refusing to give him the satisfaction of an answer.

“That’s right.” He moved his thronesled into the room. Something in his tone of voice made her think that people had come here, just not touched the racks of herbs and carefully stored tools.

“I barely knew her.” A dozen, two dozen faces that she’d barely known flashed before her, all of them dead or dying, their blood flowing beneath her fingers. But then, among the faces, she could count one, two, a half dozen, sleeping peacefully, clean gauze wrapped around limbs that had been mangled when they’d come to her.

“She was…involved.” It was an odd choice of words to describe the Delvian, but the way Rygel delivered it seemed to contain more levels of meaning than she could hope to count.

Jool nodded, and turned away from her contemplation of the herb shelf. She took a few strides toward the door and paused. Rygel hadn’t yet moved, and the atmosphere was one of quiet grief.

“Good luck on Hyneria, Rygel.”

And she left the room.


End file.
